When I was 22 I fell in love with a closet heroin addict. He would
come to my apartment on 19th and Mission street in San Francisco,
the heart of the drug market of the city and be able to score any
drug that he wanted just a few blocks away on 16th. One time,
he came back home with his shirt ripped up and he had fear in his
eyes when I met up with him. He played the victim and i played the
savior. He told me he was robbed and I believed him. I had no idea
that a drug sale was part of this robbery. He would fall asleep to
me serenading Sarah Mclachlan “Angel” to him. “Spend all your
time waiting, for that second chance, for the break that would make
it okay. There’s always some reason, to feel not good enough, and
it’s hard at the end of the day. I need some distraction, oh a beautiful
release, memory seep from my veins. Let me be empty , oh yeah
weightless yeah, maybe, find some peace tonight, In the arms of
an angel…” little did I know that his angel was heroin and not me, but,
I was only 22 and I naturally gave men the benefit of the doubt. He
was the same age as me. I took things at surface value because
his heroin addiction was just one of the many issues that I had to
deal with, but now listening to this song, I wonder how I couldn’t
have known better. It takes experience I suppose to recognize addiction.
And now at 42, I have all that and more experience, too much experience
and street smarts that perhaps I wish I didn’t need to have.
pounding headaches and doesn’t want to go to the doctor. “you're not a
doctor, and you haven't lived with this your whole life. It's not meant to
be rude, but you've seen a small sliver of this. Cluster headaches and
migraines are a real thing” he says to me.
And frequent diarrhea and stomach aches and paranoia and social anxiety.
He can’t get through an entire movie without going to the bathroom feeling sick
twice during and he can’t get through hanging out in the park without the urgent
need to leave and go home to feel better. And, we aren’t sexually active.
We’ve had sex once in 3 weeks. It’s early in the relationship, just a month
into a new thing that doesn’t have a lot of frequent contact so I feel like he is
reminiscent of other relations and other roads I’ve travelled before.
It also reminds me of Walt Whitman’s character in Breaking Bad.
I almost stopped watching this show, 3 episodes in because his lies were
just triggering the shit out of me. I just could not empathize with his dying
of cancer ass regardless because the LIES just trump anything, even a life
or death matter. Any relationship built of trust is what makes people WANT
to be at your bedside when you are dying, EXCEPT IF you lie to
their faces constantly, it changes the game entirely. Now, they feel like they
have the right to SPIT ON YOUR FACE while you are dying and even feel
justified to steal the savings from your debit card while laughing because it
becomes a vengeance game. “I just want you to know that I am not naive
or stupid and I have worked with the stories of perhaps hundreds of men,
maybe thousands.” I told him. I have loads of experience “seeing”
things that I wish I wouldn’t have seen in my life. “I know you aren’t.” he says,
but I don’t think he know what I mean when I say these words. He told me
that he has never done drugs, and even asked me after I laid with him on a blanket
in the park kissing him after I did acid at a nightclub the night before. “Can you get
high from kissing someone on acid?” which i calmly responded, no. There is no
such thing as a contact high from LSD, unless it is directly contacting the liquid with
the drug in it. Certainly not 24 hours after the high had been processed through my
body through dancing, peeing and sleep. NO such record of contact LSD high from
kissing exists. “You can only get herpes from kissing,”I joked, knowing that I had
already disclosed my herpes status to him before and that I really didn’t worry
about the contagious nature of my HSV and neither did he because it had been
over 10 years since i had tested positive. I thought the question was incredibly
naive and even somewhat illogical for an intelligent person like him, however it
could stand to distract my suspicion that he could be addicted to any drugs
because of stated ignorance, but his symptoms certainly are reminiscent of
someone I knew before. .
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