Page 18 of Beautiful Trauma

Thinking about it nauseates me. The helplessness I felt. Seeing him again after being apart for so long raised the stakes more than I expected. I couldn’t lose him.

I remember him asking, “What the fuck are you doing here?” repeatedly. The sound of his voice, raspy from yelling in frustration. The way I struggled to keep my hands from shaking as I let him yell, curse, and pace in and out of the room.

I'll never forget telling him I was there to kill myself because there was no way in hell I could live with knowing that I would eventually lose him that way. Heroin use was a death sentence; it was only a matter of time. “I’m here because you crossed the line. We agreed we’d never touch heroin, Eli. You promised me you would never cross that line.”

“What do you care? You have no business being here. You and I haven’t been friends for years.”

“Of course, I care, Eli. And we promised each other we wouldn’t let it get this far. You need to cut the shit. I need you to stop using.”

“You think you can come in here and make demands on how I live my life? And what if I don’t? You’ll fucking walk away again? Go ahead. Walk away. What I do is none of your damn business anymore.”

I remember the next few minutes in slow motion. I break out into a sweat thinking about it. There are two versions of this story: the one we told people, in which I didn’t threaten suicide, just that I insisted he end his with me there, and the truth. He told people I saved his life. But really, he saved mine. It wasn’t until I walked into that apartment that I realized just how low I’d gone without him in my life. Even if he hadn’t died, I was set on the same trajectory, just using different methods.

Looking back, it was selfish. A horrible moment in my life that had been brewing for years. I sat at his kitchen table, a needle full of heroin in my hand, ready to end it all. I wasn’t letting him die first. No way in hell, no matter how much my hand shook.

“I can’t sit here and know that you are killing yourself, so I’ll go first and save myself the torture. I’ll OD now so I don’t have live to see you do it later.” I’d held his stare, wanting him to tell me to stop, but also feeling like this was always how it was going to end.

“You can’t be fucking serious, you crazy fucking bitch!” He tugged on his messy, dark hair.

“You go, I go. Isn’t that what we agreed, Elijah? Isn’t this how it’s supposed to be? If you are so hell-bent on doing this shit, I am too. But I’m a coward and this is a onetime thing. This is it. You tell me we are doing this, and it’s done.”

“What the fuck? Put that shit down. This isn’t about you.” He pointed at the needle and took a shaky step closer.

“Well, now it is. You want to keep using, but I’m not sticking around to see how it all ends. I know how it ends. The same way it did for Doug, Liz, Ryan, and Jeff. In a fucking coffin.”

He went from hostile enemy to concerned best friend as he realized I wasn’t fucking around.

“Seriously, Katie. Please. Don’t fucking do this,” he begged. He kneeled in front of me as I sat at the table. His tone was much quieter now, his eyes welling with tears. My vision blurred with them, too. I was never good at seeing him upset, and three years apart didn’t change that. “Let’s just talk about this, okay?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Eli. I just want everything to be better or I don’t want to be here at all. I can’t live knowing you’re one hit away from being dead.”

“Whatever you want. Just fucking put that shit down. Please.” He forced it out of my hand and pulled me out of the chair, both of us crying.

Eli saved us both.

Sometimes, I can still feel the cold needle against my skin. My hands will shake uncontrollably, and I’ll get dizzy. Sometimes he’d call me in the middle of the night, just to make sure the nightmares that he let me do it weren’t true.

And for years, whenever he had a bad day, he would write me the same note. “If not for you, I would be dead.” Every time I’d cringe at the thought.

He saved me, not the other way around. There was a note in my back pocket, and I was committed to dying in that apartment. At best, you could say we saved each other, but I’m no hero. I don’t care what you ever hear him say. I wanted out of the misery of living under my family’s thumb and away from the guilt of being the world’s shittiest best friend. The friend who abandoned the person who always had her back.

All the years of watching as our friends lost themselves to drugs caught up to me. Years of feeling cast aside by my own family. Years of feeling like a shitty friend to the only real friend I ever had left me in a deep depression.

I wasn’t strong enough to live in a world in which he no longer existed, so I was ready to make sure I didn’t have to. I never should’ve walked away from him. Since that day, I had barely been living. We both needed help. He needed rehab, and I should have had some kind of intense outpatient mental healthcare.

It could’ve gone the other way. One or both of us could’ve died.

Instead, we sat on the floor and cried all night. In the months that followed, he worked on getting clean, and I found myself a therapist and some anti-depressants.

Now:

“That’s some shit.” Sergio squeezed my hand.

“I’ve never told anyone the actual story before.” My eyes stung with tears as my hands trembled.

“You should’ve been committed.”

“If I ever got that depressed again, I’d hope someone would. I was pretending to function for years, but I was completely broken inside. I was one minute away from killing myself.”