and so is Love

Warning

Addiction / Mental Health /Self Harm.

Being in love with an addict is not for the faint hearted.

Every human being has access to a full range of emotions but we all have our own special cocktail we commonly indulge in during the day to day life. 

When you are in love with an addict, that cocktail is usually a bit stronger than your average Joe’s. Your classic week includes feelings more extreme that what most people would go through in any five years period.

In this country this is actually how they assess your mental wellbeing.

They make you take the same test, over and over again. And no matter how well you know the questions, you keep failing.

Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by the following problems:

Feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge.

• Not at all

• Several days

• Over half of the days

• Nearly everyday

Can you guess the answer?

Brace yourself. Another storm is coming.

Being in love with an addict is like living your life on a tiny raft in the middle of the ocean. It’s suffocatingly alienating and claustrophobic at the same time. 

There’s nothing for miles around beyond the limits of the wobbly wooden planks that you share with your lover and the two boulders. You each got one tied to your ankle. They’re the traumas you both brought to the relationship, their respective weight fluctuates on the daily so it’s a real balancing act to not topple the raft over.

Treading water is already arduous when the weather is calm but the most minute meteorological change can wreck weeks of levelling work.

Fear and uncertainty are the constant feelings in the backdrop, they are the ones holding the bar.

From a mild foreboding to impeding doom, there’s the hyper-vigilance sour drip that poison your everyday by reminding you to observe and catalogue the amount of beers, of medication ingested, to keep track of every sigh and calculate the angle of droopiness in the shoulder. What does this slouch mean?

There’s the heavy metallic grip on your intestine of the sheer panic that rears its head with the overbearing whiteness of irreversible harm.

That’s the one that keep you awake and alert when your partner passes out and you can hear gargling sounds in his throat so you have to manhandle his lifeless body into the emergency recovery position. And keep the 999 number open, ready, on your phone.

Brace yourself. Another storm is coming.

The therapist they assigned you, the one you only see once a month, hands you tissues and says: 

"You really have a lot on your plate."

Indeed my plate is full, and so is my cup. Never emptied, never cleaned, constantly overflowing.

The raft is soaked and mouldy from leftovers, unresolved situations that fester and feast on your dime. It stinks.

Brace yourself. Another storm is coming.

Some days when he’s had too much drugs, he believes you have been replaced by a clone, and he will quiz you.

"What’s my date of birth?"

"08.02.82."

"What’s my brother’s name?"

"Hugo."

"That’s too easy, I’m going now!"

"You can go but maybe you should sit down and rest for a while before?"

The psychosis never lasts very long but it’s scary. I mean, it used to be very scary. But now it is routine. 

You can’t help but feel pretty amazed, every time, at the certainty it gives him. He knows he did drugs, he knows he’s high, he can recall past occurrences and knows it happened and came to pass before. Yet every time he believes. He falls for the traps of the temporary new reality.

The frustration of the habit takes over, but the question is always there: what if this time is the time he doesn’t come back?

Every time this happens, Kate Bush’s voice loops in the hall of my head: 

And now we see, that life is sad. And so is love.

Brace yourself. Another storm is coming.

And she said child, you must protect yourself, I’ll show you how with fire.

Some days the cabin fever hits and the storm happens in a tea cup.

It’s the tone of your voice when you ask for the salt, it’s the way he jerks his foot when you try to sleep or the toothpaste running out, the choice of movie to watch. The crew isn’t going along. Patience has been stretched an inch too far and it snaps. We get tangled in each others boulders and trip. The constant chafing, the restricted movements, it all becomes too much and someone needs to pay! There’s a new light on the raft and it’s brutal, it reveals it for what it is: too small to accommodate two people.

So we bicker and we push each other, we attack with ammunitions we accumulated over time, the sharp objects and words we know will do the most damage until one, or the other, falls off overboard. 

Suddenly time stops and the dread of losing the one person you truly know and love reminds you there’s absolutely no point in becoming the captain of a ship without a crew. You throw the rope of love and pull the other back up. Never an easy job.

Rose and Jack didn’t manage, but I believe if they’d know each other as long as we have they might have tried a bit harder.

Finding balance again takes real teamwork.

I love you more, i love you more for it.

Brace yourself. Another storm is coming.

Some days you laugh, like the madmen that you both are.

At the absurdity of it all.

The insights you got from the tribulations, the infinite wisdom the oceans shares with you, wether you like it or not. It makes everything so funny. 

The rules and concerns of normal society do not concern you. They do not apply here. You mock and despise them, at least as much as they mock and despise you.

They’re wasting their time in vain pursuits whilst you grapple with existence itself. Who’s more alive? The sleepwalkers or the poets? Thinking, feeling, truly, is a burden and a bliss, a blessing. The type of blessing you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Yet what is life without it? You dare not think about it much. 

A world where you care about what a hole in a jumper says about a person doesn’t sound like the kind of world worth trading the raft for.

It’s all we’ve got, isn’t that enough?

Brace yourself. Another storm is coming.

Some days it’s the lies you tell yourself about how strong you are. It’s not your first rodeo. Saviour complex. It’s more complex than they make it out to be. You don’t really do it to avoid your own problems. You do it because the unloveable deserve and NEED to be loved to heal and grow. The light that shines through the cracks shines brighter and warmer than any light you’ve ever seen before. It’s intoxicating. Every one loves a redemption story unless they have to do the redempting, until they have to clean up the puke and pick up the pieces of a broken heart, of a broken soul.

You set me free, I set you free

Brace yourself. Another storm is coming.

Some days it’s the lies you tell others, pretending you know what life is on solid ground. The hate that sometimes festers in your heart you wont allow others to part take in. You invent stories, fables of a happy life you only but dream about.

You soften the tales, you paint a brighter picture, you twist the stats. The doctor asks how much you drink. You say the truth, minus a few. Little enough to not raise eyebrows of friends, and family. Little enough to slip through the cracks of manufactured concern by the institutions supposed to keep you safe. What do they know?

Lies, lies, lies, white and otherwise. Truth and honesty exist only on the raft. Nothing else exists, nothing else feels real.

You let it slip, you let it slip…

Brace yourself. Another storm is coming.

"Baby, i know the answer! I’m gonna cut my foot off to finally shed the boulder and swim to shore to get help!"

Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by the following problems:

Feeling like he’s completely lost the plot?

• Not at all

• Several days

• Over half of the days

• Nearly everyday

How many days would it take to lose absolutely everything?

Brace yourself. Another storm is coming.