I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

One way to say all this is, My mother was an opioid addict and she overdosed. Another way is, My mother was suicidal and she killed herself. Another way is, My mother was poor and ignored, dismissed, called hysterical and hypochondriac by doctors who believed instead their well-paid colleagues who spoke on behalf of Purdue Pharma, believed the FDA who renewed and renewed Purdue’s patent, and so despite her history of addiction, despite the fact that she was in recovery, that she had all those years sober, that she did not even have bananas flambé on Mother’s Day, her doctors put her on legal and extremely profitable heroin. Another way is, Medicine tossed her to the Sacklers and they sucked her dry, destroyed her and everyone around her, and blamed her for it. Another way is, She needed help and no one gave it to her. Another way is, She had her mother’s pain swimming in her blood and her mother’s and her mother’s and her mother’s and she was fat with it.

Jesse lived like he knew he was dying, a saccharine nugget of pinspiration terrifying to actually behold. Take it from me, you do not want to room with anyone who actively lives like he’s dying.

You and I have loved each other and her and been loved by each other and by her, them, in all these houses, through all these memories which were once moments, real and felt even if forgotten. We have loved and loved and been loved despite the fissures and losses, violence, cruelty, smallness, deficits in money and time and attention, despite the betrayals and indifferences, the distance and weather, despite developing different definitions of certain words. Death, expensive, cold. How?