text: I ran into you at the grocery store by our old house, the one we shared together for over a year. You ran away from me like I was a murderer when you saw me. The expression of disgust on your face still haunts me. The next day, I was served with a restraining order. Two years of loving you abruptly came to an end. Any ounce of hope that I clung to vanished. I never understood how you could go from spending every waking moment with someone, to being banished from their life forever. I turned to the only thing I knew would make me feel better, drugs and alcohol, which was ironically the same thing that ended our relationship. The days and nights that followed seemed to blend together. I was willing to throw my life away for you, and I almost did. I drank copious amounts of alcohol, took pills, amphetamines, and everything in between. I lost my long-time job, I wrecked my car, and I lost 45 pounds in a matter of weeks. I spent half my days in the bathtub, where my skin shriveled from hours of soaking. Every relationship in my life dwindled and the people that loved me most became distant. When I first met you, I remember taking you on top of the Rimrocks overlooking Billings, Montana. It was a place reserved for special people and intimate moments, a place where the delicate sandstone formations jut out over the valley. I remember being nervous to tell you how I felt about you, the fear of rejection always seemed to plague my mind. When I got the nerve to hold your hand, it fit perfectly inside my clammy palm, and my nerves subsided without the use of Lorazepam. I intended on loving you from that moment forward. You did more for me than drugs could ever do, you convinced me that I was worthy of love. We moved in together when I had no place to go after inpatient treatment. I was silly enough to think I had changed after the 30-day program. I swore off drugs forever. You told me it was either you or the drugs, an unfair ultimatum, and I knew I wouldn’t uphold my end of the bargain. I began to sneak around and fall into old habits. I would run outside for thirty minutes at odd hours of the night, take phone calls in the bathroom, and make up excuses for almost everything. You accused me of cheating on you, which I dismissed effortlessly every time. You thought that there was another woman in my life, and it drove you insane. You told me you would never trust me, so I stopped trying. I should have saved you from the emotional turmoil of loving someone that you didn’t trust. I should have told you I was cheating on you; however, my mistress wasn’t another woman, it was a small pill named Oxycontin. When I think about the ghosts of my past, I think of you. I think of my resentment and how I drank the poison, hoping that you were the one that would die. I almost killed myself in the process and you didn’t know. I realized that my world didn’t have to end, just one world, in which you were a part of my life.