The story behind Still Here
This book exists because someone who mattered is gone. Lost to meth. Lost too young. Lost in a way that leaves you standing in a grocery store six months later, suddenly unable to breathe because a song came on the overhead speakers.
Still Here started as letters that couldn't be sent. Conversations that couldn't be finished. The kind of writing you do at 2 AM because sleep isn't coming and silence is too loud.
What it became was something bigger: a map of grief, recovery, and the stubborn act of choosing to be alive on purpose. Not just surviving. Living.
The ones we lost deserve more than silence. They deserve our best days. They deserve to know their absence made us brave enough to stay.
About Lee
Lee Masten writes about the things people think about but don't say out loud. Addiction. Loss. The messy, non-linear path to being okay again.
These poems come from real experience—real phone calls, real treatment centers, real bathroom floors, real mornings where coffee tasted like a miracle because you almost didn't make it to morning.
Lee believes poetry shouldn't be locked behind academic publishers or reserved for people who already feel fine. It should live in the hands of people who need it.
The mission
Someone sitting in a treatment center waiting room picks up this book and thinks: someone understands.
Someone crying on a bathroom floor reads a poem and realizes grief is not weakness. It's the price of having loved someone worth missing.
Someone white-knuckling through their first sober week finds the words they couldn't find themselves. And those words become a reason to try again tomorrow.
That's it. That's the whole mission. "Still here" becomes the most powerful sentence in someone's day.