The Aftermath Of Dating An Addict

My mind screams of sirens, of ambulances, of police cars. It reeks of you. Each time I hear a knock on my front door now my heart drops inside of it’s chest for a slight second, hoping it’s not the coroner, but at the same time, I’m not sure I’d be all that surprised.

See, you hid your addiction well. Told me that I was the girl to send you out of neutral. You traded cigarettes for arguments and empty bottles for sex, but I would take that before you killed yourself from the inside out. You were going to go to college. You said you were going to make something out of yourself so that one day you would never have to turn back to that city. I could understand how the others around you turned cold, but not you. You kept a list on your bedroom wall above your bed of all the things you wanted to accomplish within five years. How you were going to take you and your brothers off the streets, give your family the life they deserved.

Now they tell me you will be dead within a year. And I couldn’t understand this because someone like you could never fit inside a box like that. You were 6’5, but you were so much more than that. Your life could never be crammed into something so empty, so hollow.

You said that I did this to you, that the white powder raging inside of your veins was a product of my love. You always smelled like addiction, even on my mountaintops, the high received more affection than I ever would. I will apologize for few things, because I am still so bitter for what you did to me, for the hands you laid on my home. I know there is good within you, I have seen it, and I will only apologize if I have in any way dimmed that.

Addiction and depression are old friends of mine as well. I understand searching the whole world to never find what you’re looking for so you turn to your two closest friends. It blocks out the pain and the anger and the hurting but it also blocks out the good. It blocks out your smile, your family, your sleep. It blocks out my favorite parts of you. Or what was left of them.
Months later, after the abuse, the screams, the harassment…I still fucking care if you end up in a body bag. These sirens still haunt my dreams. My nose still tingles as if I’m the one that just snorted an ounce of cocaine and am laying lifeless on the concrete floor. My wrists itch as if I just poked them a dozen times, trying to feel release from something crawling within me.

The doorbell rings.