Yikes, That Was Close

 I’m sitting in my best friend's living room eating bad chinese food when she told me she’s been binging and purging. She’s dry, not sober, and her behavior reflects that. She complains about her boyfriend who says shit to her in bed that makes my stomach turn. I imagine her taking off her baggy clothes, baring it all for someone she’s in love with, only to hear Babe, I wish you were skinnier. In the past year, we’ve flooded the room with laughter so strong you would have thought we were children, naive to the strength of a world that does everything it can to bring you down. No gods, no sponsors, our friendship was based on intellectualizing our feelings until they turned on us, leaving us with an opportunity to escape into the lives of grown women who spend their time fighting on TV because we didn’t want to look at ourselves. 

We’ve been addicts since birth. We are two girls with alcoholic parents and ideas that we will never be enough for anyone, an idea implanted in our minds before we believed in anything else. There is no Santa Claus and there is no tooth fairy. These are lies we tell to children who are lucky enough to believe someone will see their good behavior and reward them for it. The lies we tell ourselves about who we are are no less foolish, but the rewards we seek activate the receptors in our brains that are dangerous for girls who are always wanting more. Other kids are satisfied with a Barbie dream house and a kiss goodnight. We are not children anymore. 

I left her apartment after throwing away the Sesame Chicken she bought but didn’t eat, filled with fear and sadness as I waited for the elevator down to the lobby of her building. I put on Aphex Twin to drown out the noise in my mind and end up swept away with images of where my friend is headed and the role I play in that. She goes to the dentist for a root canal and gets prescribed oxy. Sick and suffering, still in pain of a different kind, she runs out. There are drug dealers in Tompkins Square Park, to her they are neighbors. She snorts the powder alone in her room. She goes to therapy with a baggie on the table beside her computer, just out of view, just waiting for the glimmer of healing she gets in one hour to end so she can go back to the habit that leaves her with nothing but a desire for more. She doesn’t tell her therapist of her fantasy of shooting up. She stops eating because it makes her nauseous and doesn’t dream when she goes to sleep. She has no sponsor and her only friends are sober, so she isolates herself. She doesn’t tell anyone she’s relapsed. She stops taking her meds and puts her plans to shoot up into fruition. She knows what dose to take, intuitively knows how to insert the needle, but she doesn’t know what it’s cut with. A simple mistake. Not hearing from her for a few days, I grow anxious. I buy kombucha at the deli and take the train to Alphabet City. I don’t knock when I arrive. I call her name and hear nothing but silence. I go into her room and see her passed out with a needle still in her arm, vomit pooling on her pillow. I call 911, a chilling calm spreading throughout my chest, knowing how it ends before the EMT’s get there. I was too late. I sit on the couch we used to stay up all night watching True Life on, laughter as vibrant as the night summer air, and I light a cigarette while they put her body in a bag, carrying the weight of her like it’s nothing. I couldn’t save her. I lost her. 

Homesquirrel! You forgot your keys, she texts me as I walk out of the elevator. She’s not gone, not yet, but I’m still haunted by the fact that I can’t be the one who saves her. I head back upstairs for my keys and find her right where I left her, sitting on the couch watching Real Housewives. She smiles at me, says she’ll see me tomorrow. I’ll show up because I believe I am strong enough to carry the weight of her, a belief as foolish as the lies we tell our children