Co-addicted – Epilogue – My Addiction

I want to tell you something before you read this.

I’m not telling you this story from the other side.

That’s the thing I need you to understand right away, before you settle in with the idea that what follows is the account of a woman who went through something difficult and came out clarified on the other end. Those stories exist. They are good stories and they are true for the people who lived them and I am genuinely glad those people exist.

I am not one of them.

I’m telling you this from the middle.

I am twenty-three years old and I am sitting in the kitchen of an apartment that used to feel like ours and now mostly feels like mine because Matt is in the bedroom doing something I have stopped asking about, and the coffee I made forty minutes ago has gone cold, and the specific, heavy quiet of a Sunday morning in a relationship that has stopped being the relationship you started is all around me like weather.

I’m not dramatic about it. That’s something I want you to know about me. I was not always calm – there was a period, somewhere in the middle of this, where I was not calm at all, where I said things at volumes I am not proud of and cried in bathrooms and called my mother from parking lots at midnight. But that period passed, and what replaced it was not peace. It was a kind of tiredness so thorough it felt like a new personality.

I want to tell you about Matt.

Not the Matt of now – I’ll get there, and you’ll understand when we arrive. I want to tell you about the Matt I met at a university party in September, nearly two years ago, who was tall and easy-confident and laughed at something I said with a genuineness that I felt in my whole chest. I want to tell you about the electricity of that first night and the weeks that followed and the specific, overwhelming feeling of a new thing that is working – that is so clearly, obviously working that it feels like something you were always going to find.

I want to tell you about loving him.

Because I did. I loved him the way you love someone when you are twenty-one and it is the first time and you don’t know yet what love costs when it goes somewhere complicated.

I still do, which is its own problem.

This is a story about addiction.

His, primarily. The substances, the specific arc of something that started as a party habit and became a need and then became the organizing principle of his life and by extension mine. But also mine. The other kind. The kind that doesn’t have a clinical name but that I have been turning over in my head for months now, the specific, compulsive, impossible-to-stop need to save someone who has not yet decided they want to be saved.

He is addicted to the thing that makes him disappear.

I am addicted to trying to bring him back.

We are co-addicted.

That is the honest word for it and I have only recently been able to say it without immediately surrounding it with qualifications and softeners and the various linguistic protective equipment of a woman who knows a thing but is not yet done with the knowing.

I am not going to tell you it ends well.

I am not going to tell you it ends.

The coffee is cold.

Matt is in the bedroom.

The morning is Sunday and quiet and mine in all the ways that matter less than the ways it isn’t.

Let me tell you how we got here.