ph: Viola Cangi
You know when love is just beautiful? When you find someone who’s creases in the palms of their hands perfectly match up with yours? When that person’s smile is like the sunrise to your happiness? Just the mere thought of them creates a tidal wave of butterflies in the pit of your stomach, but in a good way. When you awake every morning to either their scent right beside you, or a sweet text message telling you everything you want to hear. When that person makes you feel like the only human being existing in their world and you just feel an endless supply of love, like nothing, not a single thing can bring you down?
I can’t tell you about that kind of love. I can, however, tell you all about the dark side of love. The kind of love that feels like the most poisonous, addictive drug that courses through your insides and rots away your very core. The kind of love that leaves you both numb, a hopeless void, and at the same time as contradictory as it sounds, in excruciating pain. When you find yourself sitting in your dark bedroom at 3am, just staring in a type of catatonia caused by racing thoughts of how it all ended up here? When you become all too familiar with the taste of your own tears and you just bleed your eyes dry until you can’t cry anymore. The type of love that has you shaking in bed, anxious if they’re going to walk away this time (again) for the millionth time. Wondering, in a constant battle with yourself, if this is your entire fault, if this is what you deserve? It’s like heaven and hell in comparison. That’s how I imagine it anyway. Some people are just blessed with love, with a perfect person, with flowers growing from their fingertips, and warmth dancing around them. But some people are cursed with love, with swollen eyes, and heavy hearts, and thorns breaking through their skin.
I have never been addicted to any substance, but I imagine that it’s exactly the same really. You meet this person who you think is so right for you, so intriguing and you’re excited to try this person. That’s your first hit, your first snort, your first injection, your first sip; the first time the drug flows through your bloodstream and it’s euphoria, it’s perfect. It’s warm and it’s magnificent and it makes you feel things you’ve never in a million years felt. You want more, no, you need more. You need them; their body, their smell, their voice, their sound, their presence, their feeling, their promises, you need it all until you become greedy. You become addicted to this person, essentially your own personal drug, designed just for you, baby. And that’s when the darkness comes. This drug isn’t all you thought it was but you’re desperate. It’s not good for you anymore. It’s arguments and miscommunications and not understanding what you want. It’s fights and broken glass and bruises and lust. It’s addiction. It’s adrenaline and screams and sobbing into your pillow. It’s begging and pleading and promising you’ll do anything for more, just more of him, anything as long as you don’t take away the drug. You can’t live without it and by now the scariest and saddest thing of all has happened: you’ve lost yourself. The single, most important thing- your own self- has been lost in this addiction. You’ve lost friends and family and people look at you with pity, they start to notice the sunken eyes and your shrinking frame. They notice that you’ve become less of a person and more of a ghost, that they’re speaking to you but you aren’t hearing them. The world spins and whirls around you in colors and fast flashes and it makes you so f*cking nauseated, so you choose to just stay in your bed, the only safety you know anymore. Eventually, you start your rehab. You cut them out, you detox their existence, they disappear and so do your cravings. But it doesn’t last for long does it? Because they always, always come back. A text message from him, a “hey how have you been?”, a drunken phone call, an “I miss you”, a night of sex…whatever it is and he’s back in your system and god, you forgot how good this drug was, and before you know it you’re sucked right back into this disgusting, vicious cycle until you’re left realizing that this drug that you need so badly, it doesn’t need you back- it just uses you, it just plays with your head to get what it wants. And you’re right back in the darkness, sitting in your bedroom, dragging on a cigarette with mascara melted all over your face and palms, sobbing, hating yourself for letting that drug back in, for believing that this drug would finally love you the way you loved it, for hoping that just this once you’d have your heaven.
But let me tell you something. You will never find your heaven if you stay in your hell and those thorns will never turn to flowers if you stay out of the sunlight.
I’ve spent the last year and a half, chasing after an ex boyfriend who left me and has since lead me to hell and back. He’s used me and blamed me, he’s never thought he was wrong, he’s bounced between me and other girls and never once apologized. He’s made me feel like I was nothing, worthless, and never good enough. He’s hardened my heart and I’ve cried a sea’s worth of tears over him- and that’s not even the half of it. I’ve walked away countless times just to let him back in when he comes back around, because this boy is my drug. Can I even call it love? Probably not. But I can’t let go. I wish I were strong enough, but I’m drained, I’m exhausted, I’ve overdosed and sometimes I feel like I’m already dead.
There’s a quote that goes: “I would have followed him to hell if he asked me to, and with all he put me through, maybe I did.”
Maybe I did.
