Catharsis: Chapter Five

At last, somehow, it ended. If this were a good story, if it were fiction, I would have ended it. If this were fiction, I would have realized that she was destroying me and I would have stood up for myself. I would have cut her out of my life the way one amputates a diseased limb. But this is not fiction, and I’m not quite so proud of the way it ended.
She ended it. She didn’t want me anymore, and so she hurt me one last time, by telling me with tearless eyes that I was putting stress on her. I imagine that I was. Addicts live very stressful lives. Either way, she ended it like that, and we never spoke again. But I saw her in the halls. I saw her talking to our mutual friends who had no idea who she was behind closed doors. And every time I saw her, I felt a tightness in my chest akin to fear, but twice as painful.
If this were fiction, there would be some closure here, some nice way to tie up the story, but the thing is, the story never did get neatly tied up. But that’s the difference between stories and real life. Stories end where they end, but real life goes on. Wounds heal. Tears dry. This part of the story is about how that happened. I made friends. This is another piece of information that I neglected to tell you, but I never had good friends. All of my friends were watered-down versions of Annabelle; in other words, they took advantage of me and I lay down and took it like a dog. I know, poor me, but trust me, I’ve gotten much less dramatic about this.
So I made friends. Good friends this time. I got it right for the first time in my life, and I found love. Not the kind you usually look for when you read a story, but my friends loved me and I loved them. It took a long time, years actually, for me to finally open up about Annabelle and what she put me through. They listened. They helped me through, and they picked up the pieces of me that I didn’t know had broken off, and put me back together.
And the pain slowly went away.
I feel like this story needs some kind of ending, and so here it is. We all go through hard times. We all get hurt and we all learn from our mistakes. At the end of the day, we are better for it. I am better for having gone through this.
I am better.