Continuing the discussion from A letter to him for my 1 year:
Continuing the discussion from One year anniversary of his death:
Continuing the discussion from Dreams, tattoos, two years and you:
Dear K,
Something I’ve learned in the last two years is that sober addicts keep track of elapsed time better than anyone. Parents start counting babies ages by the weeks, but that quickly becomes months and years. After the death of someone close to us we may notice the month anniversaries for a while but inevitably a year sneaks up and we say “I can’t believe it’s been a year already” and every year after that is the same phrase repeated just with a different numeral.
Kids don’t count elapsed time, they do countdowns… how many days until their birthday, or vacation etc.
But addicts…
We keep track down to every single day, and sometimes hours. It’s been 36hrs since you last used? Congratulations because that is a huge amount of time when your in active addiction. Hopefully that 36hrs will become 37, 48, 72… and then you can say 4 days, 10 days, 22 days… It doesn’t matter if it’s been one day or 799, every one of those days was a 24hr struggle and a decision to add another day and keep going.
In about 12hrs, I will hit 730 days. Two full spins around the sun without heroin and without you.
When I think back to where I was one year ago, it may seem like not much has changed, I’m still living at my moms, spending more time with my dogs and at work than having a life.
The first 365 days I spent struggling just to continue to exist. I was drinking a scary amount at one point, in a relationship that almost killed me and generally not dealing or confronting any of my issues including you and then your death and the guilt I felt. I stayed in a terrible relationship partly punishing myself, thinking that I deserved to be treated like that because of some of the awful things I’d done in the past.
I finally left that black hole of a human being, started seeing a therapist, stopped getting drunk alone and for the first time in over seven years, I didn’t hate myself.
I’ve still struggled with the urge to use… sometimes I can go weeks without getting that little twinge of fire in the back of my mind that won’t stop scorching my nerves to get a bag. But then out of nowhere I have dreams, maybe more appropriately nightmares about using. Occasionally I think the boredom of sobriety gets to me and the idea of numbing everything sounds so irresistible. I’ve found that even at those moments where the urge to use is strongest that my stubbornness and refusal to reset my sober clock has been the one thing keeping me from a huge mistake.
I think I need to move. There’s too much here that reminds me of you. I have to drive by our old apartment everyday to get to work. I have to see the motels we’d spend hours waiting at for hookups. The streets you used to stand on the corners with a sign begging for change when we’d be short for the day or I didn’t work. I knew you had started begging, but you lied to me at first… too embarrassed that thats how you’d come into the cash for our supply that day. I was embarrassed too but I didn’t stop you from going out there.
How fucked up were we? I have a hard time admitting that we were like those people on Dr. Phil whose families are begging them to get help and sit on stage in shock and disgust as they watch the video of their family member digging through trash and shooting up outside behind a bush. I tell myself we weren’t that bad but we absofuckinglutely were. We spent a good four years being the highly functioning addicts that no one even suspected. But the last three years we definitely had times we were living out of the car, us and the dogs. We definitely shared a single 1$ cheeseburger between us as our only food for an entire day or only ate from the random groceries that strangers would give you instead of cash sometimes… of course we’d have preferred cash but when you haven’t eaten anything except 1/2 a burger and some crackers in 4 days… granola bars and canned tuna is a damn buffet.
We were disgusting too. When I think about our last apartment it makes me sick, I never would have allowed anyone in that place except for us. No one can fathom the level of filth your willing to overlook when your so deep in addiction that your entire life revolves around getting and doing that drug.
I have to remind myself sometimes that it’s only been 730 days since I walked away from that hell hole. It seems like a different life that someone else lived.
Sometimes it’s this life that feels like a dream, and I’m going to wake up next to you in the bed with the 12x12in burn hole in the middle from you passing out with a cigarette. It still baffles me that I’m never going to see you again, and it’s so hard to not think of the drugs when every single god damn thing reminds me of you.
I have a few close friends here who know the vague story of “used to do heroin but been clean a few years”… but I don’t think anyone can appreciate the importance of daily milestones like these unless they’ve lived through this shit themselves.
I don’t know if it’s ok to call your mom any more… I know when I finally did for the first time last year that her and I both needed it and those tense uneasy first minutes turned into hours of conversations, laughing/crying and continued calls throughout the year but seeing her and your dad in November felt rather final.
You’re the only one I was ever excited to acknowledge the days to.
So. tomorrow. I’ll probably spend my day with the dogs, I’ve been needing a drive to the coast… maybe spend the day on the beach screaming into the ocean.