Loving the Addict; Not the Addiction.

Drugs makes me angry. I find myself personifying them like some anti-drug cartoon they show you in elementary school. I see needles hopping into peoples veins, digging themselves between peoples toes as they unknowingly fall into a high. I see cocaine pretending to be pixie sticks luring our children in for a lick. I see pills mistaken for candy. But in reality, I am angry at the addict. I am angry at the addict because I love the addict, just not their addiction.

In my head I don't see a strung out junky injecting themselves with God knows what. They take their happiness up their nose and it makes me angry. It is a selfish kind of angry. It's the kind of angry you develop when you don't see someone using the present you gave them.

Didn't you like it? Wasn't my love enough?

And of course that's not it. It wasn't that my love wasn't enough. It wasn't that I wasn't a phone call away. But there is something that feels so wrong about placing the blame on their shoulders. It's like hating someone for not liking the gift they gave you; isn't that on you? Shouldn't you have known they wouldn't like it.

If I really loved them you would have known. If I have really loved them I would have been able to get them to stop. If they really loved me; they would have. That is what I tell myself when I am not staring off the ledge.

Everyone will tell you that it isn't true; that there would be no way you could stop them. But the truth is, you don't believe them. You don't believe them until you are staring down the same barrel or needle or razor blade. You don't believe them until your the one sniffing mirrors with dollars. Then you realize what you have fell down into.

And of course you don't see them as the junky sleeping on someone else couch as they take one pill after another. You see them as the love of beach and curve of their smile. You don't know them as the person on the corner of your the sketchy gas station downtown.

That is someones daughter, son, brother, sister, love of someone's life.

Sonder is the word that describes what it feels like to realize a random person has valid, complex, and vivid experiences as your own. That someone lives outside the spectrum of your narrative. This is what it felt like when you died. Suddenly you had a life of your own, outside my expectations and experiences. I could not imagine being you, and therefore you fell out of my spectrum of understanding and into a coffin. I could not see the reasons or things that brought you here. I could not see pumping yourself with poison until it took you under its calming breath.

Suddenly you were a random person.

I guess on some level I could understand what it would be like to fall asleep with just the sound of yourself again. I guess I could see how intoxicating it would be.

I then start to blame all the people who gave you the drugs. I start to villainize people just like you simply because they aren't you; simply because you are dead and they are alive. How dare any of us go on living without you. Time doesn't care about my outrage; and so it goes on. Bills still got paid after we put you in the ground. Graduations and birthdays still happened. People still fell in love and started families. I still fell and love and started a family.

But it doesn't change anything. Cause your gone and out of my scope.