Love Was My Drug

A story I am tempted to send into Marie Claire for the Reader's Story section (I'd dig the R1000 and haven't been published in a while!) Any pointers or advice would be appreciated :)

What happens when your drug of choice is not a pill, but love? How toxic can a relationship really be?

Sometimes, it’s hard to stop loving someone, especially when you know that you have to. I have been ambivalent about my feelings towards my first love since the day I remember us meeting: I was sixteen, it was the beginning of Autumn, and I was dating somebody else. By virtue of him being my best friend’s older brother by the time I was seventeen, a crush of some sort was bound to develop. This was not made any less unfortunate that, by seventeen and a half, I was dating his cousin. By eighteen, he was less older brother and more friend – I got used to his constant teasing and was unsurprisingly chuffed if he ever hugged me hello. By eighteen and a half, something was up: I made any excuse to visit his sister (and inadvertently but not accidentally, visit him too), and I noticed a definite change in his attitude toward me. Two months before nineteen and it was official, he liked me (back).

And this is where I wish we had done things differently.

Instead of asking if he could kiss me in his car that night, why didn’t he just drop me home and walk me to my door, politely greet my dad, punch me in the arm, and leave it at that? Why did he have to change everything with his questioning eyes, and his kiss?

Part of me wanted him so desperately, so deeply and in every way imaginable, that I was overwhelmed by desire and longing to the point of being unable to concentrate on anything else except his face and soft lips. I imagined nothing else than the completeness I felt when things were good between us. And yet these occasional highs could not carry us through the lows we felt when things went wrong.

Another part of me shuddered at the thought of him: it abhorred the scent of his aftershave, his breath; it wanted to sprint across a field rather than let him touch me. This part lived in the day: it was fed by sunlight and happiness, by reason and straight-thinking. It lived on thoughts of his temper and mood swings; memories of his inadequacies providing a perfect armour for my reasons not to love him. It was angered by him and wanted to hate him as much as it possibly can, and it would not be swayed by trampolining day dreams and thoughts of his desire to please me.

And yet, with night and the imminent darkness comes a quietening of this voice, perhaps a dulling of my rational faculties. My mind swings back to memories of feeling invincible with my hand in his, entering a room and knowing that no matter what happened, it didn’t matter – we had each other. As every day descends into the darkness that is night, I cannot help but reminisce about how perfect we were; how everything about us was so carefree and unthinking. We were wild in our love and the way we expressed it, and yet, I would be foolish to succumb to nostalgia without remembering our darkness. It was inevitable that our passion would lead to violence; our relationship was too intense to keep the pendulum from swinging in a darker direction. He had a way of drawing every emotion possible out of me until all I had was this desperate urge to push him away before he suffocated me. Instead we both withdrew into ourselves, oscillating between hiding from each other and lashing out at each other just to feel something.

I spat words at him with venom so poisonous I shocked myself. I had never known myself to feel so much anger towards one person, and yet there were times when I wanted to hurt him so fiercely that he would never recover, never be able to retreat into those afternoons of quiet moodiness that he often sunk into.

He once told me that we loved each other too much, and that is why we would never work. At the time I disagreed to myself, thinking that I could never be capable of hurting someone who I love. And yet when I look back now, with the maturity of four added years and the advantage of retrospect, I can see what he meant. We fed off each other’s love to the point of taking too much from one another, we got to a point where the only thing left we had was our hatred, and that is when it all got so ugly: we shouted. Screamed. Cried. We licked our wounds and went back to each other for more fixes of this violent love, and although it was creatively stimulating at times, it was ultimately too draining for either of us to continue fighting against each other so much.

Historically, the truly great and passionate loves never lasted: Marilyn Monroe and J.F. Kennedy, Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, even Gossip Girl’s Blaire knew she could not survive her love for Chuck Bass. And perhaps this is the natural sequence of things: destructive love must make way for a restorative, comforting love that brings two people together, rather than widen the chasm between them. We could never make each other happy because we simply need too much from each other to make it through life together. I did not come out of that relationship unscathed: neither of us was strong enough to withstand such emotional upheaval and I was riddled with guilt and emotional exhaustion. In fact, nobody around us could take another round of us together – with every horrid word and torrid fight, we drew those around us into our darkness, mixing our loved ones into our bitter silence and awful rage.

And in the words of the great Lindsey Buckingham...

“Loving you isn’t the right thing to do. How can I ever say things that I feel? If I could, baby I’d give you my world”. And I would if I could. But we both know that “You can go your own way, you can call it another lonely day.”