Leyana

I don't know why I can't just walk away. I don't know how it got to this point. I don't know why I feel so much guilt. All I know is that today, for once, something clicked, and I realized that he is, first and foremost, an addict. That that is his identity, before the part where he was a soldier, or a son, or a lover, or an employee. That this wasn't "getting better", that he wasn't "changing", that he didn't have "it handled", that he didn't "used to be", but was, and that I was living with it.

I don't even know why I'm here. Maybe it's that I'm a novelist--published six times now, although looking at my life through the lens of the last year, I'd trade every single book, and gladly, for him to be sober, even though I know that won't happen. There is a part of me that wants to write, that needs to speak and be heard, that's crying, that can't stop crying.

I can only plead ignorance. I did not grow up with an addicted family member or friend. I had never tried substances myself--had been afraid to even try pot, although I did it once or twice in college. I didn't know to look for the danger signs--I was, and am, perilously naive about so many things. When he said that he "used to have a drug problem" but that he didn't any more, I believed him. Doesn't everybody deserve another chance? Who but a novelist would be drawn into the story of a character overcoming his own sordid past to transform into a better person?

For the sake of my own selfish appeasement, I am going to count the lies. So there's one.

And when I found him that one time, his pupils the size of needles, his lips blue--when I dragged him into the tub and turned the water on, because I didn't know what else to do, because I wasn't thinking, I couldn't think--and he promised he'd never again, that he could never do something like that to me again, that he was so deeply sorry and just afraid about reaching out to someone again, I believed him. Especially when he asked me to take him away from that house, to take him away from that life.

So there's two.

The medication, that one for pain from the war injuries? The other medication, to treat nightmares for PTSD, from serving in Iraq? That they "weren't addictive", that he was on the smallest dose possible? That his mother got them, because she had the insurance and could pay for it, and he couldn't, and she rationed them out to him because she was paranoid, because she sometimes took them for herself.

Oh god, it hurts to think I could be that stupid.

There is three.

The time he got so angry and suspicious about "where I was going in that outfit", the time he tried to throw me out, demanded my key, and when I wouldn't give it up, pushed me to the ground and threw my poor, tiny dog out the front? How could I have really gotten suckered by that story, the one about his ex wife and how badly she cheated on him (and what hell she must have been in, marrying someone that became an IV heroin user) and how it would never happen again--and it didn't he, he never touched me again, although he scared me, screamed at me, tore me apart with words so completely that I wasn't sure how to put myself together again.

Yes, that is four.

The days where I was too scared to come home--not because I was afraid of him, but because I couldn't take the way my skin would crawl, because I didn't know which person I would get, the angry *******, the sweet lover.

Actually, I don't feel like doing this any more.