TheBanyanTree: Enabler

[maria gibson]

Knowing that I cannot help you is a burden even as I know yours is not my
burden to bear.  I lie in an effort to protect you, assisting in an attempt
to help.  Fruitless.  I cannot help you.  You have to help yourself.  All my
life I have watched the effects of alcohol on people I love.  The power of a
simple formula of ingredients and preparation has such an enormous pull for
some, no draw for others and yet is nothing but that simple formula for the
rest.  For those of us not pulled down the slippery slope or shoved from
that high perch, true understanding is impossible.  All we know, all I know,
is a helpless horror as we watch the descent.

I've seen the fall but you.  You aren't falling.  You are rushing headlong
into it trying to escape nameless and well known demons.  You seek it, chase
it, wallow in it.  You step on all those around you to get to the one thing
that will surely destroy you.  My love for you drives me to try to help but
the way I help isn't helping at all.  I don't want to abandon you but each
day takes me closer to the realization that it may take that drastic measure
for you to understand all you lose with each raise of the bottle to your
lips.  And even then.  Even then, it may not be enough.  Losing me on top of
everything else may not be enough loss for you to suffer the pain of never
raising the bottle again.  I don't fully understand it, the pain stopping
would cause you, and the strength it would take day by hour by minute.  I
can't understand those things but more, I can't understand why I am not
worth it to you, why a fiery liquid seems to mean so much more to you than I
do.  You may not have that strength, you may yet have many layers of down to
go before you are ready.  We are at opposite ends, bookends of struggle and
angst yet we both serve to hold up our end of the bargain.  You drink, we
suffer, I watch.

There may be nothing left when all is said and done.  I dread that it may
come to that or worse.  It may never come to that and you might die a broken
man at the bottom of a very deep and painful bottle, the helpless worm who
could not escape the intoxicating ambrosia which held you, cradled you,
encased you, destroyed you.  Perhaps you will never swim out but continue
treading until you slowly just sink in and disappear, never even trying.
Not trying for me.  Not trying for you.

>From where does this impulse come for me?  Can't I see that rescue is
impossible from any source but that which lies within you?  Within you and
dormant, within you and waiting?  Is it there?  I dig with ragged and
bloodied nails, sweating and crying to find it for you, to unearth the
desire for you.  Fruitless.

It's frightening for me that I have come to recognize which person you are
at the moment and then adjust my own reactions to fit who I'm dealing with.
Are you the sane, rational person whom I know loves me and is kind, generous
and tender?  Or are you the mean hateful one trying to drunkenly bully those
around him?  I'm intelligent enough to know they are the same person but
also in enough pain of my own to pretend that I can deal with one in order
to sometimes have a piece of the other.  I know that we lead one another in
this multi-layered dance, feeding off one another like vicious piranhas to
get what we each need.  I get to feel that to rescue you makes me a hero and
you get to never lose me no matter how badly you treat me.

I know what I should do.  All around me know it and try to reason with me
and my own addiction, my addiction to you.  The dawning of the final
realization is coming, the sky is pinkening over the path that I will have
to take.  It is as full of broken glass as the path you will have to tread.
Still stubbornly holding on for today is the darkness of needing you no
matter how unwhole you are, no matter how little of you I actually get.  The
thick inkiness of needing you whole and thinking I can do any of it for you
threatens to never be washed away.

Step one for me is to step away from you.  If I knew what step one is for
you, I'd do it.

Neither of us is ready.

Maria