Welcome to the bottom of hell

Nobody talks about the witnesses.

We talk about addiction like it only happens to one person. Like the damage is contained, like it lives inside the body of the person using and stops at the edge of their skin. We give it a face the addict and we build our entire conversation around that face. The recovery. The relapse. The rock bottom. The redemption arc if we’re lucky. And somewhere in the background, watching all of it, are the people who loved them. Who are still loving them. Who woke up every single morning and chose to keep loving something that kept choosing something else over them.

I don’t know what it’s like to be addicted to pills. I don’t know what that pull feels like, that specific gravity that makes someone keep going back to the thing that is killing them. I’m not going to pretend I do.

But I know what it’s like to watch.

Some people are not strong enough to handle the day to day. I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean it as the truest, saddest thing I know. Some people wake up and the weight of being alive is already too much before anything has even happened. Before the phone rings. Before the bills. Before the ordinary cruelty of an ordinary Tuesday. And instead of finding a way through it they find a way around it. And the way around it is the thing that destroys them. And everyone who loves them gets to stand there and watch and call it by its name while they refuse to.

I’ve personally lost someone extremely important in my life. They aren’t dead but they have problems in their own personal life because of things they went through that prevented them from having a bigger role in what we could have been. I didn’t speak to this person in years and the only place I had where I could talk to them, in a crazy way cause they would never even read it, was my writing. I make art of them everyday and they are walking a street somewhere in Europe being completely clueless about it. And I lied, I never forgot your face, how could I?