I have a bad habit of romanticizing the past. I’ve always struggled with my own hindsight, remembering monsters from my past as modern day saints instead. Remembering people as if they had been who I wish they were, instead of who they actually were.
This past summer I was on a bar stool next to Tim as we played word games on his phone.
“I used to play this game with Jeremiah all the time,” I told him as I leaned back on my bar stool to finish my drink, “He’d send me messages through the app and talk shit to me, even though we were both in our apartment laying on the same couch.” I laughed lightly, as I allowed the memory to play freely in my mind.
Tim set his whiskey glass down on the bar, “You know, when you tell me stories like that, it makes me think that he wasn’t awful all the time.” he said almost absentmindedly.
I gave him a sharp side-eye, “He wasn’t.”
The summer after he threw our world upside down, I moved as far away as my commute to work would allow me. A small town I knew very little about, next a half-dozen other towns I knew nothing about. When people would ask me, “How did you end up all the way out here?” I used to shrug with a laugh and say, “I needed to make sure I didn’t share a Home Depot with my ex.”
A couple weeks after I’d moved, I was sad and lonely, and hitting the dating apps hard. I was broke and hungry and agreed to a second date with a boring guy under the premise of “the best chicken parm I’ve ever had”. When I got there he was watching A Star is Born- the newer one with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. I had no idea what the movie was about, I’d never seen this one, or any other rendition before. It was at the scene where Alley wins a Grammy, and during her acceptance speech Jack crawls onto stage drunkenly slurring, “did you just win?” He eventually stands up next to her, but then pisses himself on stage next to her, and the crowd roars with laughter in the middle of her speech. The embarrassment in her voice, and the panic that overcomes her, as she uses herself to hide him, sent my heart racing. The few minutes I spent watching this scene sent me into fight-or-flight. I felt nauseated.
“What the fuck is this?” My trauma response barked at him.
“A star is born. You haven’t seen it?”
“No,” I told him as I remained standing at the end of the couch.
It continues onto a scene where Jack is finally released from rehab. When her manager denies her taking him on tour with her, she decides to cancel the tour altogether. My heart broke, for her. I was angry, for her. I felt betrayed, for her.
“That’s a good woman,” whatshisface said out loud.
“What is?” I snapped at him, clearly exuding my own past. “Putting her life on hold to coddle his drinking problem?”
It was quiet for a moment as we both recognized the tension in the room.
“A good woman stands by her man.” He told me.
I laughed loudly as I grabbed my keys off the coffee table: “Yeah, and a good man wouldn’t put her through hell for it.”
In a recent conversation exchange with my ex, he drunkenly blabbed to me that I wasn’t able to “handle him”, in reference to the fact I’d chosen to leave him. A cheap way to shift accountability of his actions onto me. As if I hadn’t spent years of my twenties watching him continually jeopardize the health and safety of our relationship over a glass of johnny walker. As if I hadn’t once driven to every bar between Folsom and Elk Grove, looking for his truck the night he didn’t come home from Sunday golf. As if he’d never jumped out of my car at a red light and busted his face open falling into a ditch, on the way home from my nephew’s first birthday party. As if I hadn’t begged him for weeks to go back to AA with me. As if he didn’t gaslight me for months, insisting that he “wasn’t even drinking”. As if I wasn’t coming across empty vodka bottles hidden in the closets any time I cleaned the house. As if I was supposed to just remain unhappy, because he was comfortable.
By the end of our relationship, I’d felt as though I’d given up so much of myself- so many pieces of personality, just trying to keep him on track. After I finally got to clean out the debris of our relationship, and create my life again, I felt like I didn’t know myself at all. I spent the summer pushing my own limits, throwing myself into situations just to see how I’d react, trying everything once, maybe twice. Saying Yes to almost anything, trying to make up for time with myself that I’d lost.
A lot of things that happened this year have made me realize I’m not yet healed from the trauma of loving an addict. I’ve been in denial of the post-traumatic stress I’ve been carrying. I’ve been telling myself, “It’s been 2-years” as if time alone will heal me, as if healing is linear, or has a timeline. As if my healing hasn’t been hindered by the company I’ve been keeping; As if choosing to live with a different addict did not absolutely halt my ability to heal.
Wild Little Hare 