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“Because I feel like I’m dying when I’m with you, and I feel like I’m dead when I’m not.”
No one needed to love me if it meant that it hurt them this deeply.
“I want you to know that you’ve been the best part of my day every day since I was twelve years old.”
“My life has been a shitstorm from day dot, Molloy, and the whole goddamn town knows it. I’ve never had calm. But you?” His tear-filled eyes implored me to hear him. “You were like an island. Somewhere for me to go and escape. Somewhere safe. Someone to anchor me, if that even makes sense.
I was officially eighteen years old. I could walk right out the front door, and nobody could stop me. I could leave. I could be free. But the four small faces staring expectantly up at me were so defenseless, so utterly dependent on my ability to provide for and protect them, that I knew in my heart that I would never leave this house until I could take them with me.
How could I justify addiction to someone who had never lived through it? How was I supposed to make her understand that for most of my life I had been desperate to escape? That the only solace I’d ever been able to find had been in the soothing drag of a joint or a mind-altering line of coke, in the numbing effect of benzos or the thrilling buzz of uppers? How could I forget the euphoric fucking feeling of heroin?
Molloy didn’t know what it felt like to wake up every morning with a strong inclination to attempt suicide. She didn’t know how it felt to be a helpless child, half-starved from hunger, and even more starved for a way out of a home he wasn’t wanted in.
She could never understand the excruciating self-loathing that came with realization that the one vice that had once helped that kid make it through the day had silently morphed into something he couldn’t make it through a day without.
“Exactly. I’m not replacing you, Molloy.” I couldn’t. “I’m trying to fix me.” For you.
