The Night {Your Problem} Became Our Problem

“Well, there’s your problem!” I snapped to the person that I thought I loved most.

“…But, he can deliver it quietly, your parents won’t even know,” he said.

I—being too young, too oblivious to understand what all the signs had meant before—had only realized it on the last night that we ever saw each other.

I thought that we were having a good time. I noticed that John seemed a little more agitated in the past few weeks, but I didn’t understand why… and maybe that was my fault?

He was distant—both literally and figuratively—and when he would spend the night, something felt… off. He fell asleep first every single time, completely knocked out next to me in the bed. As if my time with him wasn’t worth it past maybe, 60 percent human battery life.

Then, it seemed like he was spending more and more time in the bathroom.

Then he said that fucking name again, and it was a weird name—it didn’t even sound real. The name of… who again?

“He goes by Slammer these days,” he told me. Slammer? That should have been my first clue.

“I’ll be quiet, I promise. Don’t worry about it, I just want to try a little bit.”

Then I remembered what he had said earlier.

“…Well think it should be legal. If they were all FDA approved and passed through the feds, people wouldn’t be getting sick off of this nasty street crap.” That was Joe’s takeaway after we finished watching Requiem for a Dream.

“To try… try… heroin? Right here, right fucking now, right in front of me?” I tried to speak normally, but my voice did that crack, the one that you never mean to break just before you’re about to cry.

I saw red. Then I saw the tears blur his figure in front of me.

It occurred to me that this is not how people try heroin for the first time. Not at one o’clock in the morning, not with their girlfriend there, and her parents a hallway length down from my room.

This was a lie. And probably not the first or last lie. But I really, really fucking loved him, and for a very brief moment, I thought, well, maybe?

“…No. No, fucking, no. I can’t let you do that.”

I never even bothered to ask how John met this “Slammer” guy. I was trying to be too cool, to “casual” to seem worried about him. His personal life was his life, so, no, that would make me look too attached, and I didn’t want him to know how much I truly cared.

“He’ll park across the street, it will be like, five minutes. Don’t worry, Syd, I would never do it in front of you!”

That’s when it hit me.

This is why I never realized before, never took his very drug-casual remarks too seriously, and never noticed the physical signs. He was hiding it, never taking it in front of me, spending more time away from me, and he had just  mistakenly owned up to every one of my love-suppressed suspicions.

Being so young at the time, for the first time ever having a significant other in the house in which I grew up… I look back and am so grateful that my mom was within earshot of my room to hear this argument. I was over my head.

“Well, there’s your problem!” I tried hard not to say through those awful, blurry tears. It was like my body was trying so hard for me to not be able to look at him anymore, because he wasn’t really there anyway.

After that night, my parents didn’t allow him to come over again. After fighting off the initial urge to see him, to call him, to text him, I didn’t want him back again, either.

After all these years of the guilt that I felt for not being supportive, not being there, not even trying to help him with his problem.

I still believe that it was the right thing to say.

Had I not said it, had I joined in with him, or just been a doormat and let John walk right over me, I can’t even imagine the person I would be today.