Dear Kyle,
Tomorrow is one year. One year, three hundred and sixty five days, or to quote that damn cheesy song from Rent: “five hundred twentyfive thousand six hundred minutes”… Tomorrow is one year I’ve been clean from heroin, and tomorrow is also 525,600 minutes since I got in the car and left you on that front porch with a final “fuck you” as my parting words.
This has without a doubt been the most incredible year for myself. I have by no means magically recovered and turned my life into an “Addict to insert some life affirming career helping orphaned baby sloths” talk show recovery success story, but so much has happened in this year and regardless of how bad things got, I am ok. A year ago that’s not even something I could claim.
I got clean! Then I was fired from the job I had somehow held down through the addiction. I lost you to an overdose, a month later I lost my roommate and two other friends in a car accident. I celebrated my 30th birthday the day of their funerals. I struggled with depression and the worst of PAWS that absolutely no one can understand how months later your still struggling with those sorts of side effects unless they’ve gone through them. The guy I was seeing, the one who was so great, the complete opposite of you in every way possible, the guy who had his shit together and is going places in his life… yea, that one, put me in the ER with a fractured nose, orbital and hand. Almost killed me and I refused all pain meds even after surgery. Just two weeks ago my mom had to have a double bypass open heart surgery. I had to sit at the hospital alone.
I’ve overcome some serious shit and been thrown down over and over again. It’s also been frustrating, those close to me who know about the addiction… every time my life went to shit they assumed I was going to relapse and it pissed me off they just assumed that’s what I’d do. I certainly thought about it a lot… making the call, waiting in some parking lot for that little bag, the unbearable anticipation waiting to get someplace to use, so anxious to feel it comfort me. But I only now realize that when everything else in my life was falling apart, and I was blaming myself for everything wrong, the only thing I knew I was doing right was not falling back into that Mariana’s Trench of a black hole.
I say “clean from heroin”, and not just “I’ve been clean for one year” because I most certainly have not been sober, or clean from just about anything except heroin. I went cold turkey from a nearly 100$ a day opiate addiction. I quickly replaced one problem with another by pouring vodka into just about every glass put to my lips. You and I both know how we could hold our liquor and drink all day with no one around us the wiser.
There was the day 3months post clean date that some dark shit from my past that even seven years together and i never told you about… That monster blew up in my face and I soaked my wounds in liquor, and decided it was ok to go to work. Surprise surprise I got fired for that little hiccup, and how did I handle that? By snorting a bag of coke!.. So no, I have not been sober a year, but coke and stimulants weren’t ever our thing ya know? We partied on em, and fucked on em, but they weren’t ever a daily requirement to function. Liquor on the other hand… we both know we were alcoholics. We had that revelation somewhere back in 2012 when we were waking up doing shots just to get our day going, and we didn’t get hangovers any more but got sick when we didn’t drink… I think that’s how the opiates got out of hand… obviously we were both doing pills before we even knew one another but we fed each others vices in every form: sex, alcohol, tv show binges and drugs.
Through everything that has happened this year, I have three images of you seared into my mind. The kind of things that just randomly sneak up and cause my heart to beat faster and my chest to hurt. The first is those, is the last moments I saw you alive. You were standing alone
on that white porch, so angry at me and so unaware. I know it was cruel how I left you. For seven years we were dependent on opiates and each other. We worked in tandem to ensure we’d be straight for the next day. Everything was just about getting by til the next bag, and we did for a long time. I betrayed that co-dependence when I decided I was done. After years of us promising we would do it together, we would get clean, we’d help each other to get through the hell of withdrawals. After how many countless failed attempts and days spent throwing up while simultaneously shitting our brains out only to give in and pick up a bag, swearing we would just wean ourselves down so it wouldn’t be so painful, until finally I had no more time off work and we were back to our routine. Always an excuse. I knew if I told you I was leaving, wether it was a week, a day or 10 minutes from that final goodbye when I pulled away in the U- haul, I knew you’d convince me to stay because “we can do anything together.”
That Polaroid in my head of the man I had been hand in hand on a rollercoaster with for so long with anger, fear and utter betrayal etched into his face watching me go. When I think of what tomorrow means, it means that day. I did my last hit early in the morning, and it was sunset as I threw the dogs into the U-haul and awkwardly climbed in.
The 2nd image I can’t seem to forget about you from this year is the last photo you texted me. You still believed that we’d be back together, that i’d just drive 800miles to the Ozarks and be at the lake house like old times. “We could sit on the boat and watch the sunset” you told me and sent me the picture “what I see right now”… and the most perfect neon sunset on that lake… Your dad made that the background photo on your facebook page after you died. It’s a beautiful image and I hate it.
The last thing that continues to creep it’s way from the darkest parts of my mind up to center stage is something my brain created, I wasn’t there, You didn’t send me a text. It’s a mosaic of assumptions of what I imagine your final hit was like, bottle of Jameson, alone in your childhood bedroom, with the same old school tube tv you’d had since middle school and that Beatles record on the dresser next to your graduation photos. The room where your mom whom you loved so deeply found you and the needle too late.
…thing is, I don’t know if any of that is true. I haven’t had the strength to call your parents or brothers since the funeral. I haven’t had the will to find out exactly how it all went down because I know it could be so much worse than even what I have in my mind.
I have this weight of guilt of not being honest with you at the end of our relationship, at the end of everything. I betrayed you and the history we had. I should have told you I was done instead of stringing you along like it was just a matter of time before we were back together. I knew you and I would never be able to have the life we talked about. We were too similar in our destructive war paths, there was never one of us to question the bad decisions. I knew that leaving was the best for both of us, and that’s something I have no regrets about. I told myself you’d move on. We were 1300 miles apart, you’d get clean with your families help and eventually forget about the girl and the dogs in Carolina.
We didn’t talk for almost two months. When we finally began those first texts it was a wave of relief hearing you were clean. My heart felt like it could burst I was so happy for you. With each text telling me about your new job, starting back to school etc I was proud of you beyond words. And you were the only person I could talk to about what it was like adjusting to life post-war.
But I knew you were lost again as soon as you started calling me from parties or the summer music festival we went to annually before we were too far gone in the drugs to care about anything else. I knew you were falling, maybe I used that as an excuse to keep hiding the truth
from you. Maybe I just wanted to be back in your arms, your hands just barely touching my skin until I fell asleep.
And then I let myself get into a relationship with someone that was the embodiment of everything you were not and it was somehow just as destructive as us. You never hit me, or called me names. You hurt me in the subtle ways that no one notices until they can’t figure out why their heart is in so much pain and they feel utterly alone in bed with their partner.
I still should have told you I was seeing him. I was afraid you’d hate me even more, think that I only left to be with him. I have mild panic attacks some days, I think about what you were doing leading up to your overdose. I knew you were smoking a lot of weed, drinking heavily, had snorted a random pill or two. Is that all you were doing? Were you being honest with me? The day I posted a video of S. with him… it was that night that you overdosed. Was it just a coincidence? Or did you see the video of your dog snuggled up and kissing him? It might as well have been a sex tape of me and him, they’d both tell you the same thing; that you were out of our lives for good, we’d moved on.
I thought I was doing what was right, it wasn’t ok for me to be talking to my ex late at night. He had a right to be mad when he saw your name pop up on my phone, so in one final act of ridding myself of the past I blocked you. I blocked you in every form of contact I could and ignored calls from your friends numbers. I betrayed you one final time. I cut you off without giving you any sort of explanation.
I think back to our last phone conversation. You asked if I would meet you in New Orleans if you got us tickets to the 3 day long Halloween music festival that included one of my favorite bands headlining on my 30th birthday. Every single cell in my body yearned to say yes, you knew that exact offering was one thing that was almost as impossible for me to say no to as heroin.
Any excuse I could give you for why I said no all boil down to the fact that I wanted to go. I wanted that concert, that location that date, all of it with you. I knew it’d be a terrible mistake. I knew that we’d both fall back into the people we were when we first met. I had hated you for so long, but I hated hating you. I wanted you to be clean too and have your life back. I knew we wouldn’t ever be again, and I didn’t want us. I just wanted there to be a you and a me in this world.
I miss you. I miss you every time I listen to Sublime, or watch Dragon Ball. I miss you every time S. does something goofy that’d make you laugh or destroys a sock. For fucks sake I can’t even stare at the stars or watch a sunset without missing you. So many of my memories good and bad were with you. Just because the majority of those moments were drunk or high doesn’t take away from their impact and how deeply they became a part of myself.
I can get by the rest of my life without heroin. As this year has progressed I’ve thought about it less and less. It’s still there in my mind, waiting for a weak moment to remind me how warm, comforting and utterly numb it could make me. I know it will get easier. I know I will think of heroin less and less but there is not a day I don’t think of you. Not in a romantic way. Not in a “never should have left him” way. I just need you. I needed you to be ok too and you needed me and I failed. I will spend the rest of my life knowing I failed you. I know that you made the choice to put that needle in your vein, but I will always question if you’d still be here if I hadn’t cut you out of my life like I did.
I miss you. I miss your parents and brothers. I lost an entire family with you. I think about calling your mom constantly, but i always convince myself it’s not the right time. Maybe tomorrow is. Three hundred sixty five days of excuses seems like enough.
.
