There were so many questions I wanted to ask you after I found the kit in your bag that day. You were already in the process of moving out after a three year relationship.
Why now? was my first thought. Why would you go to drugs, to cocaine or whatever it was that you were doing, maybe speed?, why now? What did I do that drove you to it? Or what was the deviation in you that wouldn’t allow you to take an honest route to a simpler life? That was the first thought I had as I looked at the little zippered kit with its round circle of glass for a cutting surface and empty vials and the knife and other small curious items. I was falling through the floor with a stomach full of lead and I wondered how you could have thought so little of me as to call me your mother in your head instead of your lover, and hide away this thing you were becoming, or had become. What was it I did that made you keep me separate. That made you decide I could not be trusted to love or help or do what you needed. I wafted further and further away on a boat of confusion over the leaden sea, down and away and far.
Then later, they all came to me, in bits, over time. The secrets. It was almost as if I heard you confessing them to me in my subconscious, long after you were gone.
That day that we went to Canada and stopped into that dilapidated hotel you said a friend had recommended, but it didn’t look livable. You went upstairs and I didn’t. We left, you said it was ridiculous, we could get another hotel. I paid for the hotel we finally chose, in part, and your mother ultimately paid the other half. That little secret upstairs dawned on me later. How you must have gone up to buy drugs.
Then there was Jeanine. Such a fun friend the first time we went up there. The clubs were so full then, all of us in our black and silver finery, it was such a time. She was so perked and goofy and took us around and we met all these people, all of whom we didn’t meet again. The next time we went up, Jeanine was no longer taking your calls, not interested, having gone so straight, so out of the club scene. I didn’t know that included the reason she was connected with you, which was drugs.
There was the strange way you could sleep and sleep and sleep, and stay up and stay up and stay up. I really should have known that was drugs. My fault; I should have connected it, but I didn’t, I trusted you. You kept it so well hidden. You pretended to sleep when I was going to bed. I knew you were struggling to wake up on the days when you couldn’t seem to lift yourself out of bed. I got you up. I actually liked it. I kissed you, I cajoled you, I pulled on you. I made you coffee. I made a way for you to be normal. When you were working or schooling, I made sure you got up. But the work and the schooling on the side eventually fizzled, with your discontent, with your lack of focus, and ultimately with your own complete exhausted lack of interest. I always wondered how much more you would have become if only you had let me know what you were dealing with. If you had let us know why struggling through this wasn’t working. All the opportunities you might have claimed, that I would have been happy to provide and support, but you wouldn’t let me, because you clung to your secret instead.
There was the nervous way you would get into repeating yourself when you were in a rant mood. Everyone knew it. Here he goes again. No way of arguing with him in that mood. It wasn’t a mood actually, and I talked you down and tried to have patience each time it happened. Because I cared for you. I cared what others thought of you. But even I couldn’t keep caring when you assailed even me and my beliefs. It seemed only to give you pleasure to win on your chosen point, in a crazed, unfazed way. Now when I think of this, I’m only saddened, and I wonder whether you even heard what I’d had to say in any of it. It was nothing but a big argumentative fog that we couldn’t get out from under.
There was the “friend” we went up to see in Canada who claimed he would put us up and then backed out. Why exactly did he back out I wondered? You made a large furious episode of it. But I could only wonder, did he refuse you because of the drugs? Or had he only been willing to give you some, and this had all just been a huge pretext for getting some, and then we were again on our way, with me footing the bill for where we stayed?
There was the lice episode that turned the house upside down with cleaning for two days. In all my life I had heard of it, but never seen any, never known anyone who could be anywhere where they could be caught. Only much later that little tinkling connection was made in my head. You. You had been somewhere you shouldn’t. You brought them home.
But what makes me furious is that it makes me doubt everything now. All the beautiful things I experienced with you are suspect now. The things you bought me. The morning when you were asleep, when your hair lay on the pillow in the windowlight like a drawing by Alphonse Mucha. The sleeping image of you that I cherished. Were you just…. under? It all became a sad doubt.
The nosebleeds that I nursed you with. You claimed it was your mother’s Chinese medicine. Of course. Why didn’t I realize it. Now all the care and worry, I realize was misspent.
We went to the dermatologist together. Both of us had problems, but yours…. how much of it was just self-inflicted? Psoraisis is worsened or bettered by internal effects. Now I can’t know if all the effort I put in to helping you with it was worth anything, or just running around in circles.
The time I begged you to quit smoking. You tried, and the one day you came in to me, looking wild-eyed and desperate, like you were going through drug withdrawal. I had thought it was the cigarettes, gave you a massage, put you to sleep. Guess what? It Was drug withdrawal.
The only thing I can gather that helps at all comes from this moment. Maybe you did try, for me, a little. But you couldn’t keep it up.
But the worst is that, after you had gone and there was nothing left, I came to realize I would never know whether or when you had actually loved me. If you had. I would never know if you were You when you made me the silver valentine box, when you hugged me in the kitchen, when you called me little names, when we danced, I can never be sure anymore who was talking. I can never know if you were really with me at all. I suspect that you loathed something in yourself so much that you never really knew how I thought of you, that I actually adored the way you looked, and moved, and felt in my hands, and that I tried to see your way for you out of that tiny place you were living in in your past. How I wanted you to be present with me. But you pulled away.
I have heard you’re much worse now. Worse drugs came to you later. Your family finding out, rehab, identity crises, arrests, your child birthed by someone you never really could maintain, and given to adoption, further problems, and how all of it came slamming back to you.
So I can only hope that no matter what you have become by now, at least you know that I was really there, that I would have helped, that I would have loved. Because I did love you. Perhaps you’ll connect that sometime. Maybe you wanted me to see you and discover it, and hated me for not seeing it. Maybe you hated me for being so facile. But let me say that my lack of touching the bottom and seeing the darkness was because I saw only the hopes for you. Maybe you can fault me, since they were My hopes for you and not yours. That’s true. But you didn’t give me the truth. And I loved the truths I did know about you. I loved your fragility (even though I didn’t know how devastating it would become). I loved the way you styled yourself and lived your own fantastic idea of life, no matter how outlandish anyone thought it was. I loved that you treated me preciously when we were together the first two years. I loved that person I knew as you. And of course there was the best sex either of us had ever had. I was entranced with you, the way you had loved me, the way you looked when you danced, the funny small things we shared only between us. I was just in love with you. That was all.
Just after I found that kit, I called your brother. Not to rat on you, but to tell him to help you, because you were already lost to me. He told me that I shouldn’t worry, you would never be that stupid, I had nothing to worry about. I hear he’s not speaking to you anymore.
He also told me that day that I should remember that love was just “chemicals in the brain.” That’s how he put it. It broke my heart to hear it, because that meant no one would know the truth of what I’d felt. But all these years later, I can tell you, it’s not. No matter what became of you, I can still give you one sure gift. The love I gave you then was real. Very real. You can know that now, now matter what’s become of you. I have no sympathy for your bad choices, and a great deal of bitterness over the sadness you caused others, but the love I felt for the person I knew to be true underneath everything, I still love if only in a memory. I’m sorry to see you go away bit by bit. Though the rest might grow unrecognizable, I will always remember that person, and love that one, that him, the you I knew. I did love him.
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