A Lesson on Addiction

Each night as I felt the shift in the air and the dip in the bed as the weight of another person hit the mattress I knew I should tell him to go. I should tell him to leave because the pain that I would feel in the morning when he shunned me again was not worth the brief comfort I took in his arms. Not any more. The respite from the loneliness that had once seemed so necessary to my survival had now become a prison. A cage. Those few moments of peace had become an addiction that refused to allow me to move on. It made me believe that I could never find anything better. Because those moments when he allowed the walls around his heart to drop and he came to me with the starving need in his eyes that I felt to the very depths of my soul I felt complete. Like there was nothing and no one that could understand me or accept my pain as he did.

The problem was that I knew that in truth it was only the voice of my addiction that told me these things. I’d had a healthy sense of self once. I’d known my worth and reveled in my own self acceptance. I had a future, a career, peace that came from within and spend all my time searching for my next fix. But that’s what addiction does to someone; it turns them into a shell of who they used to be, it made them live but not truly be alive.

And that’s exactly what this was. An addiction, a disease.

When people talked about addiction I always thought it was only for drugs or alcohol or sex. I thought it meant a dependency on a chemical that changed they way you thought. I never thought you could be addicted to a person. That it could feel like a kind of death to part with them even if it was by choice, that it could feel like trying to tear your own heart out and watch it walk away from you. Because that’s what it felt like every time I woke and saw the regret in his eyes, the self-deprecating-volatile humor in his eyes right before he would say something that would inevitably shatter me all over again and serve to allow his self hatred to deepen.

Every morning he walked away with a piece of my heart stuck to the bottom of his shoe like yesterday's gum and every night I allowed him back into my bed and back into my arms because given the same choice would you not allow you heart mend itself and be whole at least for a little while?

I could never decide, though, if the worst part of the whole situation was the self hatred and regret in his eyes or the hopeless adoration in mine.