We argued all night. And the worst thing was that I was arguing from an untenable position. Vanessa was crying hysterically because I had lied to her, because I couldn’t even admit that I was high when I walked into the house. The argument had started as soon as I came in and she saw my pupils, as small as pin pricks, and heard my lies muffled through a mouthful of cotton as I tried to tell her that I had only smoked weed and taken some Valium. She asked me if I thought that she was some kind of naïve idiot, and I told her no. But that’s what I was treating her like. A naïve idiot.
The argument carried on all night, and at eleven o’clock we were both in bed, bunched up in our separate miseries, her sobbing and red-eyed on one side of the bed, and me alternating between tears and anger directed at her but really all about myself and my own weaknesses. I punched the wall and the skin on my knuckle split painfully. And then she said to me: “I am going to leave! I’m going back to New York! I will not have a junkie raise my daughter! If I can’t trust you now, how can I trust you with the life of my child? You’ll never see her! You’ll have nothing to do with her, I swear it!”
And her words finally bludgeon the fact home that this misery that I have been enduring for the past few months is not the end, but the beginning of once again being alive, and I am amazed at how ungrateful I am, and how completely at the mercy of the most base and ignorant part of myself that I am. I realize that I am on the brink of losing everything and being back where I started. Somehow, through dumb luck or divine intervention, I fell in love, truly fell in love for the first time in my rotten, fucked-up life, and I fell in love when I was at my lowest ebb, my worst point, my most destroyed, destitute and bankrupted, and yet somehow this woman saw past all of that and let me into her life, and allowed me an opportunity to reclaim enough of myself that I could have something substantial to offer her and yet, despite having gotten past the worst of it, having done the things that even six months ago would have seemed utterly impossible—detoxing, finding a reason to carry on, seeing the world for the widescreen, Technicolor spectacle it truly can be instead of a black-and-white junk-eye view from underneath a mountain of shit and garbage—I am still a prisoner to the screaming, whining, dying part of my brain that is content to wallow in the gutter for all eternity.
And I know what I have to do.
I have known all along.
I need to see this through to the end, or live forever consumed by the thoughts of what might have been, of what life may have had to offer me, of where those alternate paths might have led.
And I know now, I need to grow up.