I’m pretty sure at this junction I chose not to see the signs. It’s the only thing that makes sense. If I had looked honestly at what was unfolding for even the briefest second, I couldn’t have missed it.
The scratching. The nodding. The yawning. Mood swings. Lack of appetite.
It was all there. All of it. But if you ask me outright, I’ll tell you I really had no idea going in how bad it was.
At the height of my own addiction, I had a 240 mg. a day habit. Little blue pain pills, eight a day. Once I nodded out smoking a cigarette in my garage and caught my bathrobe on fire. To say my husband was less than impressed with me is the understatement of the century.
I still lied directly to his face and told him I wasn’t high, just tired. Long day, stressful job, blah blah, lie after lie.
I know they’re lies, and they still sound like lies as they’re told to me, today.
I’ve been off of opiates for eight years. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever quit, and that’s by a long shot. Nothing else touches the shivering, the vomiting, the body aches. Even my long, lustrous hair hurt. But I did it.
I didn’t wean. I didn’t trade it for a replacement strip, or a pill of a different flavor. I put it down. I took my sick ass to my job, and I stood on my two feet and took it. All of it. Because nothing has been handed to me, I built it, and I’ll be damned if I was going to let myself lay on the bathroom floor and die over a pill.
I asked him when he intended to stop. He gave me the Long List of Reasons He Can’t. Every single one of them I used, too. But when I say that, I’m the villain. I don’t understand. He has a real job to go to, an important job, I wouldn’t comprehend. He has obligations, pressing deadlines, all of the things. All of the things just cannot wait, not in his world, it seems.
So, I set a date. Not for him, of course, because addicts don’t respond well to ultimatums. They can’t believe the audacity of someone expecting them to get a grip, to get their shit together.
I set a date in my agenda, the one not full of pressing deadlines and obligations, and that is the date that I leave if he hasn’t kicked them. I can feel it, looming in the background of every conversation I have with him. I know it’s pressing its face to my window at night, checking on the progress he isn’t making.
It’s waiting to remind me that time is nearly up.
It’s waiting to tell me it’s time for me to go.
I haven’t forgotten. It’s in my agenda, the one without pressing deadlines or obligations. I flip to it every day and sigh out loud to myself. Do the mental math. Restart the countdown.
And still, he’s not even tried to kick them.
T-64 and counting.
—
Previously Published on Medium
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