“You sniffing that shit?”
I looked in her eyes. Her pupils were dilated, black. There was that acrid taste in the back of her throat, a sweet numb burning just behind the tonsils. I tasted it when we kissed. She acted weird. Her nose would run. We were both 21.
“No,” she said.
Lies.
I turned our room in the Harlem apartment upside down, looking underneath the bed and inside the mattress, pulling out clothes from the closet and rifling through bags and papers.
“Where is it?”
Sometimes she slept with her clothes on, and that was when I knew the cocaine was on her person, hidden in her pockets or bra, stashed away with cash and small fifths of liquor. Sometimes weed, pills. I found the plastic baggie inside a pillowcase before locking myself in the bathroom and flushing the shit down the toilet. She banged at the door, screaming and pleading. Another time, she took a hammer to our bedroom’s doorframe before I could find it hidden somewhere in her backpack. I dropped the entire bag out the window as she splintered the wood. It became a sick rite of passage, a ritual in our relationship. She’d go into a rage, swear she quit, hide the shit. I’d find it.
Rinse. Repeat.
I could say I wasn’t innocent—I popped pills, too. First half a pill, then a whole, then two-a-day on the weekends. Ecstasy for fun, for joy, and also sex, a heady rush of arousal and happiness and hot flashes and dry mouth and not being able to control my talkative nature, bouncing off the walls at 3am in the 24-hour McDonald’s on Broadway until I crashed and slept for hours. I used it mostly recreationally, for parties and sometimes after work, then quit cold turkey after two years when a bad batch caused a trip so loopy that I had to pull my car over to the side of the road once it kicked in. Bright orange lights flashed and streaked all around me. Ironically, she was sober that day, and picked me up.
Addiction has been in my life since I was a child. My aunt was a crack addict, hooked since before I was born and dead by the time I was a teenager. She was a dancer, graceful and beautiful and funny, a Buddhist who wore thick glasses and taught me how to meditate with beads around my hands when I was 10 or 11, chanting, “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo,” which can loosely be translated to I devote myself to the fundamental law of cause and effect, of karmic, cosmic transformations. She searched for peace, and instead found oblivion. Maybe they’re one and the same. My aunt jumped through my grandmother’s window once, attacked my mother with the sharp end of a hammer for drug money and wounded her so badly the doctor had to stitch my mother up across the forehead. We got bars on the windows after that, and they remain there to this day, a reminder that at any moment a person can turn on you. That those you love most can cause the most harm.
Early in adulthood, there was also my close friend, Grace. We’d met through my roommate our first year at a performing arts college, where I was a writer and he was a world-class dancer born and raised in Las Vegas. He dabbled in drugs, of course, being from Vegas. Cocaine gave him energy and kept him skinny, inducing a euphoric, creative state that got him to the top of his class and kept him there. And he wasn’t the only one on it—quiet as it’s kept, many of the dance teachers looked the other way as their students became hooked, because the drugs made them more alert and stronger as well, boosting them with the power and clarity to not only follow complex instructions, but also perform athletic feats they couldn’t accomplish as easily when they were sober. I’ll never forget a girl suddenly dropping to the floor in the mess hall without warning one day, getting up with a mouth full of blood and missing two teeth in the front. She was in a coke daze, unaware that they were even gone. The entire dance department chipped in to get her veneers.
That energy boost of coke is tricky, sometimes causing users to stay awake for days at a time, even when they desperately want to sleep. Grace couldn’t come down at one point, and began to experiment with sleeping pills just to get a few hours of sleep a night; of course, mixing prescription drugs and eight balls isn’t an exact science, and he eventually overdosed our sophomore year. I begged him to quit, and when he wouldn’t, banned him from doing the drugs around me, refusing to let him in my dorm when he was high or had drugs on him. It drove a wedge between us, and didn’t save him in the end. I didn’t save him in the end. After he died, my roommate who was still close to him, left college and never spoke to me again.
One day, one of my roommates in the Harlem apartment tentatively knocked on our door, holding a resource pamphlet for spouses of addicts. She worked at a woman’s shelter, and told me she would help me leave if I had to. I was mortified, suddenly aware that she had heard the arguments, the begging and sobbing, the toilet repeatedly flushing, the crashing and banging. But I was also terrified to leave. If not me, then who would make sure my girlfriend didn’t kill herself?
Of course, I couldn’t save her. I left on a random Tuesday, or maybe a Sunday, a completely unassuming afternoon when I found the baggie and didn’t have the strength to push against the tide of her addiction anymore. It outweighed me. It had outweighed me as a lover, a friend, a niece. Contrary to what movies would have us believe, we can’t control anyone’s behavior, willing them or *loving* them into doing what we want. People have to make decisions for themselves, and they alone are responsible for their choices. I couldn’t put my girlfriend on my back and carry her to sobriety no more than I could my aunt, or Grace.
Addiction stole people from me in the most insidious of ways; ways that make you feel you are doing something wrong by deciding to walk away. I felt guilty about Grace for years, wondering if I would’ve been able to steer him towards sobriety if I’d allowed him to be around me, even after I knew he was hooked. But with my girlfriend, it was like a switch flipped, and I suddenly realized it was just the opposite: staying was enabling the behavior, if not outright encouraging it. I did the dance, every time, with more and more frequency. She’d swear she would quit, she’d hide the shit. I’d find it. Rinse. Repeat. Tango. Fox trot.
I walked away from the relationship. Sometime thereafter she sobered up. She said that I was the catalyst for her to get clean. Maybe I was. Yet I couldn’t trust her again— her addiction stole that and more from me. I do think about her, not near as much as I miss Grace. I wonder if I was addicted to wanting to ‘save’ people, wanting to fix them, wanting them to love me more than the drugs, wanting to overpower them. Addiction tells us it’s love, and I wanted my love to be stronger than their addictions. But ‘love is a drug’ is a false claim. A high is just a high, and, if anything, love is sobriety: the ability to see things clearly, for what they are, even if it means walking away.
Contributor Notes
Seren Sensei is a writer, cultural critic, filmmaker, and artist. Her cultural criticism and essays have been printed in such publications as Ethical Style Journal, NAACP'S 'The Crisis' Magazine, NYLON Magazine, and Riot Material, and referenced in Jacobin Mag, Vulture, Complex, Newsweek, AJ+, People, Netflix, Vice, and more. The first chapter of her novel ‘Blue Zone,’ was published online in late 2020 through the digital imprint Arch St. Press, and in 2020 she was also named an Indie Memphis Black Filmmaker Resident for a screenplay on poor Black American artists navigating their creative processes, called ‘KITT.’ Using the pen name ‘Daniela Jeffries,’ she has also published two short stories and a novella under the now-shuttered LGBTQIA+ romance publisher ‘Less Than Three Press.’ Her art, primarily digital video installations and projections, has shown at the Vincent Price Art Museum, the Human Resources LA art space, and at Actual Size Gallery in Los Angeles, the latter as part of an Artist-In-Residency program with Human Resources LA. With her work, she aims to deconstruct the racist, capitalist, sexist, heteronormative, and colorist standards of much of our default infrastructure and perspectives. Discussing and disrupting the lack of access provided to monoracial/dark-skinned/poor/ uneducated/Black American/women in the arts, especially in film, writing, and popular culture, is the cornerstone of her ideals.
