Withdrawal

There are a few times, with a few patients, that I am jarred. She was one of these times.

Small, skinny, with heavy bags under her eyes and thinning blonde hair, I could not tear my eyes from her sad, distant smile. I knew those eyes. I knew her posture, shoulders slumped inward, defeated already at such a young age. A heroin addict, going through withdrawal.

Someone I loved once, once and deeply, was an addict too. Tall, strong, with a wild grin and deep blue eyes, tanned skin and thick hair, he didn't look the part. He hid it well. But behind the facade, despair wrapped around his mind. I saw him then, when the smile was gone and his head was buried in his hands as his shoulders shook with the desire for a drug so devastating that he lost years of his life and his memory to it, running from a past that always seemed to loom large in front of him. When he lifted his head, the motion seemed to take all of his energy, and the bruises, dark, black, heavy, encircled his once fake-bright eyes.

As I watch her walk down the hallway, I see him in her steps, stumbling slightly from days without eating, days in which his stomach would not even hold water. I see how she weakly clutches a trembling blanket closer around her thin frame, and I remember how he could never seem to get warm. I see her bones, standing out against dehydrated skin, and remember counting his ribs as I counted his shaky breathing.

When she suddenly blacked out, stumbling to her knees, I remember catching his limp body with my own weight, stumbling back, bruising my back. When he came to, he cried, and so did I.

I would not date him while he was on drugs. That was the deal, and no matter how I felt, I was firm on it. So he stopped using. For a time, at least. When the shakes finally passed, when he could finally eat and smile real, tentative, smiles, the period that followed was bright and joyful. But his eyes never lost their bruises.

When I found that drug hidden in his bathroom a year later, I sobbed. He found me there, and could not deny it. The defeat was back in his eyes, in his shoulders, in his hands. I asked him why, and all he could do was shrug. I knew why. It was a stupid question. I knew he had not faced his demons, but instead tried to hide from them behind me. And for a year, it worked.

I left him then, for a while at least, and six months later, he reappeared in my life, brighter, somehow. Less bruised, less beaten. And for just under a year, we were together again. But what once was hopeful and lovely was marred by my terror that he would begin using again. I became paranoid, and he would watch me with sad eyes that still held a trace of their bruises. We fought, we cried, we made up and fought again, and finally we parted ways.

I never heard from him again. I don't know how he's doing, if he's still clean, or even if he's still alive. But as I see this girl, just a few years younger than myself, stumble down the hallway, I send a sorrowful prayer heavenward. I pray for her, and I pray for him.

And I pray for me.