I go to my Nar-Anon group every week and I say that what brings me there is that the man I love is an addict, that I am there to learn about addiciton and face what is happening. But this confuses me, because on one hand, I feel like I know a lot about addiction, or I should know a lot about addiction, for he is not the only addict in my life.

I just wonder why he is the one that’s affected me the most. My mother is a recovering alcoholic, in fact, the entire maternal side of my family is either dead, dying, or recovering from an alcohol or drug addiction. Even my own sister, my very best friend in the whole world, has battled for four years between using, recovering and relapsing from a meth addiction.

So why have none of their addictions led me to a Nar-Anon meeting before? Why am I not scared and fearful for them? How come I could deal with it when it was my very own family members that these things were happening to, but I ran away with my tail between my legs when I found out he was using? Well, my mother was one of the lucky ones, who only had to recover once, and she’s made her sobriety last for over 18 years. My sister, she never shut me out. Even when she had spent nearly 3 years clean and relapsed, I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for her to admit that to me. But she did, and she said she felt a lot better once she did. The rest of my family, I never knew them because of their addictions.

I pray for my sister, but I do not fear for her in the same way I fear for him. Perhaps it’s because with each relapse she has had, that woman picks herself up, dusts herself off, and starts again. She has shown that she is determined to win her battle against this damn thing.

When I think of his addiction I am scared to death. Never have I felt so naïve about a thing in my life, like I'm just a scared and lost little girl. Heroin. What do I know about heroin? When I was younger it was just this big scary word to me, like it wasn’t even a real thing. It was this fairytale drug that you hear of legends like Sid Vicious dying from. I was a small town girl. Who did heroin? In fact, who the hell would even know where to get heroin?

Actually, I knew one guy when I was younger that started using. I dated him for a few weeks just before he started using. I was 15 at the time, and he was only 17. He was a really sweet boy. He took me to his house for dinner to meet his parents. He bought me strawberries because he knew it was my favourite fruit. He was really bright and smart and he could play the guitar. Then he dropped off the face of the earth. I was young then though, and I didn’t know why he stopped calling me. I figured, he’d just found some other girl, or there was something he didn’t like about me, or whatever. I found out a few months later he was using heroin. It didn’t really affect me that much though; we hadn’t known each other long enough to become close.

A few years later he came back to town though and I saw him around a couple times. He was off the heroin by then and trying to get clean, but it had really messed him up, and he wasn’t the same person. It had given him brain damage or something, because talking to him wasn’t the same. I always felt kind of sad for him though, cause he’d had so much potential. Even he became this kind of legend though. Don't do heroin, or you'll become fucked up like him.

So what do I know about heroin? Heroin kills. Heroin fucks people up. That’s about all I knew. Couple that with what I do know about meth addiction, and ladies and gentlemen, we have a whopper.

I supposed I’m scared because of what I don’t know. I feel like the people in my life, those that I love the most, have always sheltered me from this. I don’t know of the chaos of addiction; when the rent money goes missing, or the kids don’t get picked up from school, or your addict shows up where you work and causes a scene. I don’t know that chaos that other people in my NA group talk about, and I don’t want to, it scares me to death. It's part of the reason why I ran away; I knew that I could not risk living in that chaos.

But I also don’t want to be treated like I’m too fragile for this. I don’t want to not talk about it. I don’t want to be shut out. I suppose I’m afraid of being shut out again. I’m afraid of what I have to face, but I think I am more afraid of running away from it again. I am scared to death of living in the chaos of uncertainty again.

When I was a kid I had a book called “There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon.” It’s about a boy who finds this little dragon and he tries to show it to his parents, and they tell him, “Don’t be silly, there’s no such thing as a dragon.” And he keeps trying to show them, and they keep telling him the same thing, and the dragon just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, until it fills up the whole house, and reeks havoc on the whole neighbourhood.

I don’t want to pretend there is no such thing as a dragon. I want to look into the faces of the monsters I have to fight so that I know what I am up against.

NOTE: I do not believe or follow in any organized religion, but if you do and by doing so you believe it helps to make you a better person, bless you. I follow my own spiritual path, believing in god as I see him. As you read the following passage, keep in mind that when I refer to god as a him/he, I am using this article in the same way that I would refer to a ship as a she/her. The god-force that I know has no gender yet for some reason, it feels odd when I refer to him as an it.


I’ve heard of people turning away from God during traumatic times in life, saying, if there was a god, why would he bring such tragic events into our lives? But for me it was different, in fact, it led me to believe there had to be a god; for god was my only hope. God, was the only thing that could save him, and praying was the only thing that would give me hope and comfort me.

I have felt a deep and powerful force within me, felt it in the world all around me, and seen it radiating from other people, that I could only describe as a god-force. The first few times in my life that I have felt this were during times of deep meditation. God to me is the energy and balance of the universe present in all things; it’s what makes the trees grow, and the rivers flow, and the wind blow. And, it is the force defined in Desiderata that says – whether it is clear to you or not, the universe is unfolding as it should.

God has also shown himself to me in signs, symbols, realizations, and coincidences that inextricably give purpose and meaning to my life. For instance, why did I have the urge to come home back in October, just at the same time that he was starting his recovery?

It is a powerful feeling being in connection with that force. It can be a very overwhelming experience for the human heart. But with each experience, I have yearned for it more, for it brings me great peace and comfort.

During the deepest part of my pain I longed for that peace and comfort, that god feeling, and I could not connect. I yearned for it and I was in agony over my wanting. I felt absent in my connection to the earth. But a thought came to me.

“God is with you, even in your darkest hour.”

I thought about the old parable about Jesus carrying the man through his most troubled times:
One Night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord. Across the sky flashed scenes from his life. For each scene, he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand; one belonged to him and the other to the Lord.
When the last scene of his life flashed before him, he looked back at the footprints in the sand. He noticed that many times along the path of his life there was only one set of footprints. He also noticed that it happened at the very lowest and saddest times in his life.
This really bothered him and he questioned the Lord about it. "Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you you'd walk with me all the way, but I have noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life, there is only one set of footprints. I don't understand why when I needed you most you would leave me." The Lord replied, "My precious, precious child, I love you and would never leave you. During your times of trial and suffering when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you."
God is there.

I knew that god was there, but it was not that he was not showing himself to me, but that I was not looking. I was in too much pain. But I took comfort in my thought.

God is with you; even in your darkest hour. Even if you cannot feel him, you need to know that he is there. Just remember the time when you did feel it. Keep praying and god will show himself.

So I prayed. I prayed to be able to feel god again, for god to reveal himself to me, to bring me relief and comfort from the misery I was experiencing. I prayed for the patience to be with myself again and for the guidance to be able to live a virtuous and just life. I prayed for resolution and conclusion, and I prayed for the salvation of my lover’s soul.

I prayed not for what I wanted but for what I needed; god gave me a miracle.

I still don’t know exactly what god is, but maybe I don’t need to know, maybe I’m not supposed to know. I know that I have felt a higher power, that there is some force guiding me to my destiny and shaping my soul. I know that the universe is unfolding as it should and whether I have the answers or not, everything is happening for a reason.
I know that I have experienced my own personal miracle and it has given me direction in my life. I am a part of that god-force; it is what connects me to the earth, to others, to nature, to my body, to everything. It has deepened my purpose and I know that I must lead my life in appreciation and gratification for the gifts that it brings me—both small and large—life, hope, faith and miracles.

“The love you take is equal to the love you make.”
~John Lennon & Paul McCartney

“The energy you put into the world is equal to the energy you receive.”

I knew from the beginning, that I could not rescue him from his addiction. I felt powerless, and indeed I was. I waited for a year and a half, hoping I would hear something, but the snippets of rumours that I heard just got worse. When I heard he had gone to Vancouver and was living in the Downtown Eastside, I was sent reeling. I wrote his parents and received no reply. I couldn’t believe it. Literally. I couldn’t picture him there. I just wanted to believe it was another rumour.

The misery that I was living in was tearing me apart. I had been without the man that I loved for five years, the first five years of my 20s. How could it be I kept asking myself, that I had wanted and waited for him, and just when it seemed like I would finally get to be with him again, the absolute worst thing in the world happened, and tore us apart. I had spent 5 years in misery, pining over the mistakes I had made, playing the what-if game, and being totally miserable.

I knew I couldn’t go on that way, so one day, I went to the library and I got a book out on coping with grief. I wanted to be happy so bad, that I whizzed through that book. And I whizzed through what I thought were the five stages of grief too.

The book said you didn’t have to go through them all in the exact order and that sometimes a person even skipped a stage, so I started by picking out which stages I thought I had already been through. Here are the conclusions I came up with:

Denial – Oh of course, I had been in denial about the issues in our relationship for a long time. My shame about all the mistakes I had made, led me to lie, and deny the truth of what really happened. Little did I know that I was already deep in denial about what was happening to him, so much so that I didn’t even contemplate this stage in regards to the current situation – the fact that the man I loved was a heroin addict – instead, I just related this stage to past events in our relationship and placed all the blame on myself. I thought that by “accepting responsibility” i.e. blaming myself, this could relieve me of denial.

Anger – who was I going to be angry at? Not him, that’s for sure. He didn’t do anything wrong. He has a disease and that is not his fault. It’s all my fault for not doing things differently and I’m the one to blame. Okay sure, I’ve been angry at myself for a long time. I’ve felt like a fool over this situation for so long. Of course I should be angry at myself and all the mistakes I made. Okay, on to the next stage.

Bargaining – what was there to bargain for? I had already tried to get him back. And I always said, with love there is no persuasion. You either love someone or you don’t, and if he didn’t love me, there was nothing I could say or do to change that. Okay, what was next?

Depression – ha! Been there. Done that. Next.

Acceptance – okay, so he is gone. I can’t find him, no one knows where he is. I am alone now, and this is my life, and I have to find a way to cope.

So you can see, that these stages of grief were not processes that I was trying to go through, but rather processes that I was trying to stop. I thought that in order to move past this, to find happiness and sanity and not days filled with misery, that I had to halt all of these processes. Don’t deny, don’t be angry, you can’t negotiate, don’t be depressed, just accept it and cope.

It was at that time I started making plans to leave. There was nothing for me where I was. I needed something new, I needed to make something of my life. My father lived down in Seattle, a place where I didn’t know anyone, and more importantly where no one knew me. I could go there and make a new life.

And I went there and that is exactly what I did. And the world that I created was this huge fantasy of denial.

I met a new man, and I found a reason to be with him. My new boyfriend was a very nice man, and he did love me. I felt no deep love for him though, but I thought it would be enough to let him love me, and I would do my best to appreciate him and show him I cared. He took great care of me in a time in my life when even though I didn’t know it, I was probably unable to take care of myself. But I was not in love with him.

There was no passion, and not for his lack of trying, but for my lack of seeing. The man I was truly in love with was the boy that threw cherry blossoms at my feet one spring as we walked through the park, the boy that was too shy to sing me the words of a song he had written for me but strummed it on his guitar, the boy who drew a picture of my heart, with the words “Handle with Care.” And the man who became the father of my child.

And now I found myself relegated to a life where romance consisted of pasta dinners at Olive Garden, and going out to see the latest blockbuster. I know that sounds terrible, and I don’t want to make my ex sound like a dud or discredit his love. The truth is he could probably show more romance than I could have ever seen at that point. He once called me his muse, and I could never figure out why, for I never thought that I could inspire anything, not even myself, at that time in my life. I feel awful sometimes about being in that relationship when my heart wasn’t in it, because in his own way he did try. I was just the wrong girl, I was just never his girl.

The world, the real world that I had known with the man that I was in love with, was so full of magic, the everyday kind of magic, that puts you in awe of the universe and beauty that is life. I can’t explain it, but I’m sure some of you have known it, and my mum always said, “Well, if you could explain it, then it wouldn’t be magic.”

Now that he was gone, my world felt dull and gray and empty. The world felt too real, too solid, and time made everything too permanent and unchangeable. So I retreated to the only place I knew where magic still existed, where there was no time, and nothing was permanent – into my own imagination, and my dreams.

I thought that my new boyfriend could be my life, and the man I was really in love with could be my dreams. So at night when I went to bed, I would dream of the man that I was in love with. Literally. I started to train myself to have lucid dreams, so that I could make him appear. There were several dreams when he came home to me, or we met in magical ethereal places and had the conversations we were never able to have, living the life that was just not possible in the ordinary, hard, material world.

I began writing faery-stories about us, about different scenarios of all the reasons why he was not in my life - magical beings that stole him away, or created illusions so that I could not see that he really was there all along. Anything that would keep me from seeing where he really was.

There was the real everyday part of my denial too. And for all I kept in touch with people, I might as well have been in China. As long as I didn’t go home, as long as I didn’t ask about him, or talk to anyone that knew him, I could believe that maybe he was okay. Maybe he really wasn’t in love with me, or maybe I had hurt him too much, and he had moved on and created a new life for himself.

I stayed there for almost two years, trying to make my life, trying to make things work. I kept myself busy during the day, consumed myself with things so that I could make excuses not to look within. The first 8 months were a difficult time for us because we were waiting to have my green card approved, and my boyfriend supported me during that time. So it was this big ordeal that I could focus on, whether we had enough money, how I could work hard enough at taking care of him so he wouldn’t think I was just mooching off him, working odd jobs when I could.

Once I got my green card, I focused on putting everything into place. I had started a great, well-paying and prestigious job, that any girl in the world would have loved to have. We moved into a big two-bedroom apartment, with 10-foot ceilings, an on-site gym, indoor/outdoor pool, even weekly yoga classes. We bought new furniture for the place. I thought I needed all these things to make me happy. The newer and better my things were, the harder I worked, the more times I went out with my boyfriend, the more money I had, the happier I would become.

I had spent the first year and a half down there focusing so much on daily life that I didn’t have time to look toward my future at all. Day to day was all I could plan for. But finally in my daily living, life was coming together. The apartment was set up, I was working steady at my job and I had plenty of extra money.

When day to day living finally became easy, there was nothing left to do but look at my future and decide what I was going to do next. I started thinking about going back to school or maybe starting a business. But starting either of those things down there didn’t feel right, I wanted to do it back in Canada. I didn’t want to start school, because it would take me two years to finish my degree, and I didn’t want to be there for another two years. I didn’t want to start a business down there, because I didn’t want to have to move it to Canada.

It was at that point I started to realize that I didn’t want to make my life there. I had decided I was going to plan to move back to Canada. This was just about 2 months after we had signed a one-year lease on our apartment. So I thought, I will save money and when our lease is up I will have plenty of money to move my life I’ve set up here back to Canada. I had planned to give my boyfriend an ultimatum as well – I’m going back to Canada, you can come with me, or stay here. Little did I know that it wasn’t just my country that was pulling at my heartstrings.

It was late October or early November when I had this terrible realization about my life. I was out at the shopping mall buying clothes or something, and I was heading home for the evening. It was about 9:00 at night. My car was parked outside, and I had to walk through the Pottery Barn store to get to it.

I had been to that mall many times, and always parked my car in the same spot. I had walked back and forth through that Pottery Barn god knows how many times. I’ve always had this slight hatred of Pottery Barn, with it’s overpriced, fancy on the outside, crap on the inside particle board furniture. I had never bought anything there and was just passing through as usual.

But I saw a dresser there that was on sale, and I had been wanting to buy a new dresser for my apartment for some time. I stopped and looked at the dresser and was considering buying it. All of a sudden, I stopped what I was doing, and I walked as fast as I could out of the store and ran to my car. I got in my car and sat down and all I could think was – What the fuck?! How did I find myself here? – 26 years old, in white middle-class American suburbia, buying a fucking dresser at Pottery Barn? I realized right there I had become so far removed from everything that I wanted my life to be. I realized that my life had no meaning, that I was filling it with superficial things to fill this hollow empty void that I felt.

What did I want though? What would give meaning to my life? It had been so long since I asked myself that, that I had no answer. All I knew was that I would rather die than buy that fucking dresser from Pottery Barn. I rolled down the window of my car. It was wintertime, but the air was warm and with just a cool breeze blowing. I tried to feel that breeze on my face and just appreciate the beauty of the night, but I felt so far removed from the earth, from god, from anything that felt truly worthwhile.

I suddenly knew that it didn’t matter how hard I worked, or whether I could buy anything I wanted, or whether I had the most fun. I knew that none of it would ever fill the empty space I was now feeling inside of me. I had a brand new bag of new clothes, and my huge new apartment with my nice boyfriend was waiting for me at home, and I knew that none of it would ever make me happy. I just sat in my car and all I could hear was my soul screaming.

I started to feel the pull more and more as the days went by, started wondering how I was ever going to make it to the end of that apartment lease, but something else happened soon after that, that helped me to make up my mind. I lost my job. The university where I was working was trying to balance the budget, and rather than lay off a lot of the lower paid employees, they decided to cut a few key positions in higher administration and reorganize at the top. My position happened to be one of them.

I was devastated at first. I had considered myself to be very lucky to get that job, and the pay for it was at about 25% more than the average pay range for my field of work. Not to mention they gave me my last paycheque on November 30 – less than a month before Christmas. Little did I know that losing the best job I ever had would be one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Once I found myself unemployed, and I knew I was not going to find another job like that one, it forced me to look at my life. I had let my job become a huge part of my life, because it kept me busy. I was very focused on it, and I didn’t mind working extra hours. Now, I had to look at who I was without the great job.

And I saw that I had no reason to be down there anymore and I needed to come home. I still hadn’t really told my boyfriend any of this. I had talked with him about wanting to move back to Canada, but he had no idea that I was considering doing it in the next year, and especially not in the next few months.

So my plan became to get a new job and save enough money to be able to come home. Once I started thinking about coming back to Canada, I finally saw what I was looking at coming home too.

I knew that there was no way I could live in Vancouver without trying to find him. My real vs. fantasy world was finally crashing together. I knew that I had to leave my boyfriend, that I would not be asking him to come back to Canada with me – there would be no ultimatum for him. I knew that it was not fair to him to only have a part of me, and that he deserved someone who would truly love him, and that the right thing to do was tell him I was going home without him.

And I did. Three months later, after I had saved up barely enough money, I packed up my art, books, and clothing into my car, and drove back home. I left everything else with my new ex-boyfriend, and when I was finished moving my stuff in the car, I left the car with him too. I didn’t want any of it. I just wanted myself back. I just wanted my life to have meaning again.

________________________________________

When I first came back to Vancouver, I knew that I needed to spend a lot of time with myself in order to learn who I was again. I knew I had to take my time to recognize the superficial things in my life and let them fall away, so that I could regain my true self.

I had finally been able to see what a powerful and strong force denial was. I could finally see that fantasy was not magic. I had been hiding from my pain and it was the reason why I could not make any friends while I was down in Seattle and why I could not sit and meditate for long periods like I used to. I was finally able to admit that I thought he was dying, and had mustered up the courage to finally ask someone about him. But even though I knew these things and I was making progress slowly, it was still too painful to be with myself. It was painful to be alone with my own thoughts, and I wanted to be out with my friends all the time or doing some kind of activity. I could be by myself for a little bit, but only short periods of time. I had torn off the wrapping of myself, but I was still too scared to open up the box.

Since I’ve come back from seeing him again, I have just wanted to be alone, to write, read, do yoga and be introspective, to slow down and not do so much doing. But even in these past two weeks I’ve still felt that unwillingness to be alone. I am living in a busy urban city and life just happens around me. I get invitations to go out, I had a mini-vacation planned in advance, summer events, a trip to the island for the long weekend planned, etc. And even though I feel it is necessary to be alone right now there is a still a part of me that has been fighting it.

But I am alone now, today, finally, and almost unexpectedly; half of my own doing, and half of fate’s. I feel as though god has been guiding me to this place where everything has been stripped down until there is nothing and no one left but myself. I am now being forced into solitude because I am finally going to let go of the denial that I have been in and see the truth.

All these little things have been happening, and the world is booming its big voice at me saying, now is the time for Solitude. The first sign was when I had my phone stolen last week, and I had to live without a cell phone for a week. Not having the ability to call people or have them call you at a moment’s notice makes it a hell of a lot easier to be by yourself.

The second sign though, was the big one. I was supposed to go and visit my sister on the island for the long weekend, but I talked with her last night, and she told me that she just has too much going on right now to have company over for the entire weekend.

I haven’t seen her, or even been able to have a real conversation with her since my reunion with him. My sister is my best friend, and she grounds me. When I talk to her, she has this way of listening, and making me feel at peace. She knows me, and I can tell her anything and I know that she will just listen and understand. I’ve tried talking to my mum about all of this, and some other friends, but they are not able to relate to me in the way I know that my sister can.

I really wanted to see her this weekend, but she is going through a tumultuous time in her life right now too. She is battling her own drug addiction and she is just at the beginning stages of recovering from a relapse, she is dealing with an inevitable breakdown of a relationship she’s been in for almost a decade, she’s trying finish school and cram for an upcoming exam, and all of this on top of two children she is raising.

When I was talking to her last night on MSN, and she was telling me she didn’t think she could have me stay, I started to cry. I wanted to say, but I need you right now, please could I just come and see you. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, I couldn’t be one more thing piled on her plate.

And I came to see that all of this is directing me here to being alone. I thought about going out to shop for a bike after work today, and instead I just told myself no, you need to go home. I have been invited to go camping with some friends for the weekend instead, and I just told them no, I need to stay home.

Maybe I am longing for the comfort that my sister could bring me or the relief of the company that my friends could provide. But god is calling me, and I know that I can find more comfort and relief right now, if I just look inside.

Hello me. It’s been a long time.

My mother, who is herself a recovering alcoholic, once told me, you can trust everyone to be true to their nature. Therefore you can trust that an alcoholic will drink, that a gambler will squander all the money, and that a liar will lie.

My reflection of this philosophy has led me to understand more about addiction as a disease, the separating of the person from the addiction. A woman in my NA group said that you can never trust an addict. I don’t know if that is the whole truth.

I know my addict, I know beyond a doubt that he has the purest heart I’ve ever known. But I do not trust his addiction. In fact I fear it more than anything I’ve ever known. The day I confronted him about his drug use I asked him point blank, and he stared me straight in the face and lied to me. He had never lied to me before in our whole relationship and we had been through many things. He had always told me the truth, even when it was hard.

And I think that was what scared me most about the whole situation. I always believed that trust was the foundation of a relationship, and here was this demon, ripping all the trust between us to shreds. But still I felt a separation between that lie, and the truth of him. It felt as though it was not him speaking to me. I felt as though he was calling for help from far away, but there was something standing between us and I could not save him. Underneath it all I was still able to see his intention.

Witnessing intention can give us hope, and it can also foster true trust. But we must set boundaries and protect ourselves from the chaos of addiction for it is something that we can never trust.

This is still something that I do not know the answer to. It is one of my greatest fears about my commitment to loving him. When the time comes to spend our lives together, how will I live with him, and trust him, knowing that there exists this addiction, and that at any moment, our lives could be catapulted into complete chaos. Something tells me that part of the answer is constant vigilance, recognizing the signs before everything comes crashing down, but I also know that I do not want to live on the edge of my seat all the time. Is that what I have to do though? I trust that he does not want to start using again and I know that it is his intention. But I also know that he is powerless over his addiction. He cannot tell me he will never use again, and be completely honest; no, for it is one day at a time.

When I found out he was using it felt as though I had been hit in the head with something large and heavy and hard. I thought I knew him, and because of what I thought I knew about him, I thought it would kill him.

I became hopeless. Time passed and nothing changed, and I just dove further into my misery. My hopelessness drove me down into denial. I believed that his addiction would kill him, but I didn't want to look at that and instead I created diversions so that I didn't have to admit what was happening and I created this fantasy world where as long as I didn't know where he was I could pretend he was okay.

The problem with denial though, is that eventually your soul starts screaming and it keeps screaming until it gets so loud you can't ignore it and you can't ignore what it needs. When my soul was screaming loud enough, and I finally knew I had to listen, it was telling me to have hope.

It started with the courage to accept what was happening and to face it, to ask about him. It had been over three years since I had tried to contact him. No one had told me anything, no one had talked about him. I suspected certain people knew about him, or had maybe heard what he had been up to, but that he was a painful subject that no one wanted to bring up. The first thing I had to accept was that it was up to me to ask about him. When I finally asked one of my friends about him, I had hoped my friend would tell me that he was okay. What my friend said was that he was so far in, he would never get out. Those were his exact words. He also told me that he was HIV positive.

Part of me believed it. Part of me felt again like I was being dealt another hard heavy blow. The hopeless part of me was saying, there goes the future you wanted, no more babies together, no growing old together. But the hope in me said, he's still alive, it said, you still love him no matter what, and your love is stronger than addiction. It said even if he never gets clean, even if all you get to do is tell him one more time that you love him, it's worth it. And I was still driven to find him.

When I heard that he had gone home, and that he was in recovery, I didn't know what to expect. Five years is a long time and time is capable of changing a lot. But you know our addicts are stronger than we may think they are, and maybe we have to give them more credit than we do.

He told me his stories. Twice he had almost died from overdosing. His heart stopped. He had been stabbed in the leg and couldn't go to the hospital because he had a warrant for his arrest. He almost lost his leg. He went to prison for a year. Life kicked the shit out of him.

But when I saw him again, he was even more beautiful than I remembered. He still had that same innocent and beautiful smile and the same light in his eyes that I fell in love with. He was still whole and healthy and he too was being strong enough to face what life was throwing at him. It was as if nothing had changed except that he was stronger now.

So have hope, because underneath the addiction is the person that we love. And that person, struggles and suffers and fights with this just as much as we do. And even when we think that they are choosing to kill themselves, maybe inside they are hoping they can overcome this too.

I never understood what I did that day, when we broke up. I seemed to explode right there in the kitchen, left the breakfast burning on the stove and stormed into the room yelling and waking him up and pulling him out of my bed. I still can’t imagine how that must have been for him. I still don’t know what caused me to lose it that day.

I remember writing him a long letter that same day and giving it to him. I know I said a lot of hurtful things in that letter but only because he told me how much it hurt him to read it. For the life of me, I cannot remember what I wrote in that letter except for, “I’ve found the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.” I was talking about him.

I remember the last thing he said to me after I told him to leave, as he was walking down the stairs to my apartment. There were tears in his eyes, and he said, “You don’t know what love is.” And so cold and cruel, I looked right at him and I said, “You’re right.”

I knew though, that I loved him, but he was right. I had no idea how to show my love, I had no concept of what I needed to do with love.

It was a week later, when we were both suddenly with new people, and angry and bitter at each other, that I came upon a realization. I was sitting in my chair in my bedroom, looking out over Texada Island. The sun was shining in through my window, and I was just sitting there, thinking of everything that had happened in the past week, and trying to come to a resolution of how I felt about it. I was trying to figure out how I had found myself with someone new, why everything with him had failed, and trying to figure out just what it took to make a relationship work and just what commitment meant to me.

And it hit me then and there, came tumbling down like a tonne of bricks. I realized that whomever I loved, I needed to show them everyday, I needed to be gentle with their heart and appreciate them. I saw that love is work, but that it is necessary work, and that the only way to make a relationship successful is by doing everything necessary to show that love. And that to be committed to someone is to stick through all the hardships together and not run away from the problems when things get bad, to be able to truly say that no matter what happens we are in it together.

And then, after I had realized all of this, I said aloud, “Why couldn’t I have done that with him?”

I wanted to tell him all of this. I wanted to go back to him, and show him that I loved him, I wanted to work through all of our problems and be with him no matter what. But we were both with new people and I felt ashamed and scared to tell him.

When I saw him a few months later on Hornby Island, I felt there was still so much left unsaid between us, and I knew he felt the same way. I could see it every time I looked into his eyes that day. I wanted a moment alone with him, to say something to him that would make it okay between us. I just wanted to tell him that I still loved him, even if we weren’t together then.

I remember going back home to find him, after I had moved to away to go to college. I felt so awful for everything that had happened. All I wanted was to let him know that I never meant to hurt him, that I just wanted him to be happy. I could tell he was not happy back then, and I always felt that there was always something more, that I had to say or try to do to change that for him.

I still felt so ashamed to admit the things that I had done wrong. I couldn’t even talk about that day that we broke up. All I wanted to do was pretend that none of it ever happened, put it all behind us, start over and make everything okay again.

And then after two years, I remember when he called me, and he said he wanted to come and see me in the town where I was going to college. I felt that he had finally forgiven me. I was so happy that he had wanted to see me and be with me again. I remember coming to visit him in our home town again, and we talked about getting back together, and I was so happy. I thought I had finally been able to show him that I loved him.

But that last time that we were together then, I remember telling him that we should take things slow. I remember him telling me that he was dating someone else and that he wasn’t sure if he was ready to move away from home, and I said that we still had lots of time to figure things out. I wanted to tell him that I wanted to be with him, right then and there, for the rest of my life, but I was scared. I was scared that he might not feel the same way, that he might be scared of making a commitment to me. So I said let’s take it easy, when I really wanted to take things seriously.

And then the next time I called him, and I told him that I was coming home to visit, and that I wanted to come and see him and stay with him, he said it wasn’t a good idea. I thought it was because of that other girl. I thought I had missed my chance because I didn’t tell him that last time we were together that I wanted to be with him.

I thought that he was moving on and he didn’t want me around, that he didn’t want me to interfere. That was in the early spring. I didn’t hear anything about him until the summer. My sister had gone to a party back home, and she said that she saw him there, and that he had a new girlfriend. I thought that he had gotten over me, that I had caused him too much pain and that he had finally decided to forget about me.

I was miserable without him, but I didn’t want to call and tell him that. I thought that he might be happy with her, and I didn’t want to interfere if he was trying to start a new life. All I ever wanted was his happiness, even if that wasn’t with me.

But still I didn’t know that he was happy, and it wasn’t enough for me to blindly believe that he was. So I still asked about him, when I had the chance.

It was at the end of November, that a friend of ours had come to visit me and my sister. He had been living back home and we were chatting about people who still lived there. I asked my friend about him. I said, “Do him ever see him these days? Do you know how he is doing?”

And he said, “Yeah, I see him around. He’s really into his down these days.” He said it so damn casually to, as if he had always been “into it.” Maybe he told me, because he cared about him, and he thought I would be able to do something about it.

I can’t describe the feeling that came over me. It was a mixture of pain and disbelief and panic. I felt like someone had hit me in the head with a shovel. I felt completely floored and defeated.

You know, those first couple years we spent apart, maybe it was arrogance on my part, but I truly believed that he loved me and that we would get back together. I didn’t ever feel threatened by any of the other girls that he dated, because when I called him, he would always come to see me. The distance between us was nothing but a ferry ride away. I even thought that all of the bullshit and lies between us would be forgiven, that they were just the mistakes of youth, and that someday a day would come where we would be able to start anew. I thought that we had time. All of it was something that I could fight, and he was worth fighting for.

But when my friend told me that, I felt that I was up against some huge scary monster that I couldn’t defeat. I dropped everything then and there and came to see him. I knew I had to confront him about it and I just followed my gut and I ran to him. I had nothing though, I had no knowledge to face what I was up against.

When I saw him that last time, down on the docks back home he didn’t look sick. I asked him about it, and he looked right into my eyes and lied to me. And he was so convincing and so resolute that I believed him.

I had planned to apologize to him that day too. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry for all the things that I had done that ever caused him pain. I froze when I was with him though, and I didn’t realize that I hadn’t said I was sorry until he was walking away from me. I turned around to go back to him, and I could still see him, but he was far away from me, and I let him walk away, and I didn’t tell him.

As I was walking back home I started to realize that everything he had said to me earlier was a lie. I knew within minutes that he was telling me everything that I wanted to hear, so that I would just go away.

I remember telling him that I loved him, and that I would do anything for him if him ever needed me to. I just wanted him to believe that, but I knew that my words sounded weak and hollow, and I knew that he didn’t hear me.

I had been planning on moving back home then, that coming February, and I thought that I would see him again when I came back. My grandmother had just died at that time, and my mother was trying to get things in order to sell her house and take care of her belongings and I said to her that I was coming back to help her, but I knew that I really wanted to come back to see him to again.

I wanted to be with him so bad back then. I just wanted to show him anyway I could that I loved him. It was two weeks before I was supposed to move back home that I decided that I wasn’t going to go. I knew that I wasn’t strong enough to face what was happening to him. I wanted to save him, to rescue him, but I knew that I would probably end up following him down if I went back. There is still a lot that I don’t know about addiction, but still I knew enough to know that I was helpless, and that even if I said everything perfectly that his recovery was up to him. It was not my battle to fight, even though I would have fought it if I could.

I felt like a part of me was slowly being killed, and there was nothing I could do about it, like I had a disease that was spreading through me and killing me. When our daughter was born and her and I were both still in the hospital, I felt that everything that was happening was easy. I had been so scared when I was pregnant, and I did not want to be having a child. But when she was born she was so beautiful and perfect, and I felt as though it had brought him and I closer together and deeper in love. She was going to live with good people who would be able to take care of her. I felt as though everything was happening as it should and that everything was going to be okay.

It wasn’t until I got home and when I woke up the next day, and realized that it was going to be 19 years before I saw her again. My mother’s instinct kicked in and I started to panic. I thought, what if something happened to her and I never saw her again. She was a part of me and I would be lost if something happened to her.

Right there and then, letting her go was no longer easy for me and it never has been again. I could no longer protect her and keep her safe. I had to tell myself that that the parents that I had chosen for her, would love her and protect her and care for her just as much as I could, and that they felt the same way about her. And only by telling myself that and believing it, was the only thing that made it possible for me to let her go. I have felt several times over the years that I made a mistake when I let her go, but I am still able to come to the conclusion that I did the right thing and I feel that it will be okay.

When I found out that he was using, I felt that same feeling again, only this time it was him that I couldn’t protect. I wanted to run back to him. I wanted to protect him. He was my soul mate and he was dying and I was losing something that was a part of me.

Things got bad after that. I started looking further away from myself and I hated myself for what I had done, and I blamed myself for what was happening to him. All I kept thinking about was how I should have done things different, and how I should have said all the things I never did, or didn’t say right, and that if I had, none of this would have been happening to him.

For the first time in my life, I felt hopeless. I started doing drugs more and more, and hanging out with people who didn’t care about me, and who were bad for my spirit.

I think really that it was that same mother’s instinct that saved me though. I woke up one morning, and I hated where I was and what I was doing to myself and I was thinking about him and thinking about our daughter and I knew that had to stop what I was doing to myself.

I have always known that someday when our daughter is older that she would seek us out and come to find us. I could see clearly to that day, and I wanted to be able to tell her that letting her go was worth it. I wanted to make her proud. I felt that even though we were scattered and broken, the day that she was born, we became a family, and I had to preserve my family. I still felt hopeless though, and I thought one day I would get a phone call that he was dead. I thought that I would never see him again and that what was happening to him would kill him.

I felt so much pain that he was gone from my life, and I couldn’t forget how much we had once been in love. I couldn’t believe how such a bad thing could be happening to such a beautiful person as him, and that he didn’t deserve to be experiencing the terrible life that he was.

I knew that I had to be strong and that even if I lost him, I had to tell her about us, about him. I didn’t ever want someone else to tell her that her father was just a heroin addict. I didn’t want her to think that we gave her up to throw our lives away. I wanted her to know how much we had been in love. I wanted to be able to tell her how beautiful he was, how his eyes would light up when I walked into the room. I wanted to tell her how we met, and all the little things he did to show me that he loved me. She needed to know that he loved us and that he was a wonderful and kind man and always had the best of intentions. I knew that I had to be strong from that day on, and it would do no one any good to harm myself anymore.

So gradually I stopped raving and doing drugs and set up a new life for myself. There was still a lot that I was denying, however. I still couldn’t face what was happening to him. I was unable to go back home. I lost contact with everyone there, and by that time my mum had moved away too, so I really had no reason to go back there. I still thought about him everyday, but I didn’t know where he was. I coped by creating this half-fantasy where if I didn’t ask about him, and I didn’t look for him, I could believe that maybe he was okay. I could tell myself that maybe everything he had said to me that day down at the docks was true, and that I really had nothing to worry about. I could pretend that maybe he had gotten help. Maybe he was okay and he had a new life and he was just not contacting me.

Still I ran further and further away from my life. I ran so far that I ended up out of the country. And when I was gone the only people that I kept in contact with were my sister and my mum. I went down to the States and started building a whole new life even though the whole time it felt wrong. I was lonely and I had been miserable for so long that I just wanted to experience some kind of happiness.

The day that I was going to leave, there was a blizzard, and I couldn’t leave until two days later. My mum was trying to tell me that it was a sign that I wasn’t supposed to go, but I told her she was just being silly.

My dad had said that he would help me to get an under the table job in the interim and that he would help me to file my immigration papers. But when I got down there he was totally unsupportive and unable or unwilling to communicate with me.

The job that he got me was not enough to survive on and I was going to come back home. I stayed because I had started dating someone and that someone asked me to stay, and even that felt wrong, but I did it anyway.

I have never been in love with anyone else. I would try and date other guys, but my relationships always seemed meaningless. Whenever things would start to get serious or I would find something that I didn’t like about someone or even a small problem would develop, as it does in all relationships, all I could think was, I shouldn’t even be doing this. I should be with him. I should be committed to him and being with him no matter what.

I really tried to be happy when I was down there. When I met my new boyfriend I really wanted to love someone, and he was nice and respectful to me, and he treated me well.

The first time he called me his girlfriend though, I got that same feeling, that I shouldn’t be doing this, that it felt wrong. Other guys had tried to call me their girlfriend in the past, and I had flat out told them they were wrong, and that was when and how the relationship would end. All I wanted to be was his girl, not anyone else’s. It felt wrong to be someone else’s girl. But when my new boyfriend said it, I just told myself that I should deal with it, because that was going to make me happy.

I kept trying to tell myself that living down there was what I needed to do to make myself happy. That things didn’t come easy but if I worked hard I would get what I wanted and eventually I would be happy.

Eventually I got everything that I wanted. I had a nice boyfriend, and a big old apartment, and a well-paying, respectable job, and a nice car. I couldn’t make any friends though, even though I met a lot of people. There was something inside of me that made me unable to get close to anyone. I felt like I couldn’t be friends with anyone because I would eventually have to open up and tell them about myself, and I didn’t even want to look at myself.

As time grew on, I knew that I was never going to be happy there, and that I had to leave and come back home. Eventually the pain of my denial got worse than the pain of facing my life. My soul was screaming, and I couldn’t go on living the life I was in. Finding him and admitting to what was happening, and accepting the responsibility for my actions became more important than achieving happiness. For the first time in years I took a long hard look at what my life was, and I was in disbelief that 4 years had past since I last saw him. I didn’t know how I had managed to be upright and out in the world each day and not know whether he was alive or dead.

I started making plans to come back home. This was in November. The last I heard of him was that him had gone to Vancouver, that he was living in the Downtown Eastside.

I knew I had to start somewhere, but there were very few people that I still kept in contact with. There were only two people that I knew that were in the city that might know where he was. It took so much out of me just to ask the first person, “Hey, do him ever see or hear from him anymore?” I was shaking as I was typing out an instant message. I hoped and prayed that he would tell me something good, but he had no news, and all he could tell me was that he didn’t hear good things.

I was shaking and crying so bad that I couldn’t stop, and my new boyfriend was home and he saw me, and he didn’t know what was wrong, and I couldn’t tell him. We had already broken up then, but we were still living together at the time.

On his birthday, I had a long talk about him with one of my friends that lived in the city, and he told me that he had seen him about six months earlier, and that him looked really skinny and unhealthy. He told me that he had heard a rumour that he was HIV positive.

Once I was back in Vancouver I kept looking for him, but it was slow and torturous, and I was very impatient. I asked my friend again if he could do anything to help me find him, but he didn’t really know much. He offered to ask one of his friends who worked at a clinic on the Downtown Eastside if she had ever heard his name. I thought about hiring a private investigator to find him, even though I couldn’t really afford one. I was trying to find other people too, that might know where he was. I was coming up empty handed.

I felt so ashamed that I hadn’t done all of this earlier, that I hadn’t started looking for him years ago. I felt ashamed at how naïve I was about drug addiction, and that I hadn’t spent the last four years learning and educating myself about it. I still had no knowledge and no means to help him, if I did find him. I looked into going to Nar-Anon meetings, but I couldn’t bring myself to go, because I was feeling so much pain for the first time, and I still wasn’t ready to share it with others. I was still very much afraid.

Still, I was driven to find him. I still knew that I couldn’t save him, but I did know that I needed to at least tell him that I loved him, that I had never forgotten about him, that I was sorry, and that he didn’t belong where he was and that it wasn’t too late to come home. I was still scared that I would never find him, but I knew that I had to try, and that I couldn’t turn away from it anymore, else I would never be able to live with myself.

It started becoming okay to talk about him again, to mention his name, to let people know I was looking for him. And it was just by chance that I mentioned his name to another friend, and she told me that he had gone home.

I still didn’t know how he felt about me, and I was nervous about calling him. I didn’t know how long he had been home for, whether he would be ready to talk with me, or even if he was staying with his parents again. I tried calling first on Monday after work, I dialed the number, but I couldn’t hit send. I woke up on Tuesday and I felt stupid. I thought, I’ve lived five years not knowing anything and living in misery, how could I live one more day. I got up the courage to call on Tuesday, but I got the answering machine and I couldn’t bring myself to leave a message. I thought about writing his mom an email, and I did, but I couldn’t bring myself to hit send because I was afraid of not hearing a reply. On Wednesday I felt worse and I knew that I couldn’t wait another day without knowing if him were okay. As soon as I got home from work I didn’t even sit down, I walked straight into my apartment and dialed his number.

I was stuttering and nervous when his dad answered the phone. I heard him call out to him and say that it was me on the phone for him and when I heard his voice say, “Really?!” on the other side of the phone, I felt like I could breathe for the first time in years.

I have been given a miracle to have him back in my life all of sudden. After we had seen each other, and I was down at my mum’s place, I went down and took a walk on the beach by myself. It was so beautiful down there, and it seemed like a truly magical and awesome place now that I knew that he was alive and well again. I really felt the presence of god in my life then and I just stood on the beach and looked out over the ocean and I was so relieved that I started to cry, and I just said thank you, thank you to god, thank you to fate, thank you to the earth, and whatever force it was that brought him back home.

I know that what I’ve said here is a lot to take in, it’s a long story. I’m baring my heart and my soul by telling all of this, and it is scary. But there was a time when I thought that I would never have the opportunity to tell him how I feel, and would be a fool if I didn’t take the opportunity this time.

I need to show him everyday for the rest of my life that I love him, and will do whatever is necessary to help him live a beautiful life. I really do believe that love is stronger than addiction. Where ever he goes in life, and whatever battles he has to face, he can know that I am in this world too, and that I want what is best for him and that I will always love him and strive for his happiness.