Heroin Is More Powerful Than the Love We Share

Another first-person essay on what it’s like to love an addict.

“The Small Bow is one of those rare corners of the internet full of vulnerability and dark humor that only comes from walking through fire. It’s not a place you seek out, but one that finds you when you need it most. " — Maura, paid subscriber.

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Hi friends. Today’s essay offers another perspective on the experience of loving an addict. Allis Perry’s account of her relationship with “Luke” is an honest and deeply ambivalent one, moments of transcendent tenderness sitting uneasily alongside moments of pain, grief, fear, and rage.

“I relax my posture and take his hand in mine. We sit together for a while. He tells me he loves me. He tells me how powerful heroin is. People who haven’t used it don’t believe it, but it’s the most powerful substance. It’s more powerful than love. That’s the saddest part, he says. It’s more powerful than love. Just is.”

The full essay is below.

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The Same Sad Lullaby

by Allis Perry

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He comes stumbling into my apartment in house slippers two sizes too large, glossy eyed, ten pounds lighter than he was when I last saw him a week ago. He’s slurring his words. He tells me a bee stung him in his head, that’s why he’s four hours late. I bring him into the bathroom and sit him down on the toilet seat. I kiss his forehead and tell him I’ll find the stinger. I’ve been pretending to pick a bee stinger out of Luke’s hair for the past twenty minutes.

We’ve been apart for a week, the longest stretch since we met eight months ago. He told me he had a stomachache and depression, and I understood. I hide from the world when I have depression too, but usually just for a day or two. After seven, I got a text message from his friend Travis. Luke missed band rehearsal without an explanation. “Do you know what’s up with him?” Travis texted me. “You need to talk to him.”

Finally I pressed him over text, and Luke admitted he relapsed on some pills. He wouldn’t say how many or exactly when it happened. He didn’t remember. Some pills, a few days ago. “Please don’t hate me,” he texted. “I don’t hate you,” I wrote back. “I love you. Will you come over tonight?”

I hold Luke’s head against my belly while he nods in and out of consciousness. My fingers gently comb through his messy mop of sandy brown hair, the first thing I noticed about him, and I blink back tears. He occasionally glances up at me with droopy eyes, half-closed like a toad’s.

I sing a little song I used to play on guitar with my roommates. Though it’s been months since we’ve played — I started spending all my time with Luke as soon as we met — I still remember the chorus.

Honey it’s all right
Honey it’s all right
It’s all right to be alone
It’s all right to be amongst the rubble and stone

I thought I was singing it for him, but I’m singing it to myself. It’s a lullaby. I’m putting the relationship I thought I had to bed.

I tell Luke I found the stinger. I guide him into my bedroom where we sit on the loveseat he found for me on the side of the road. The one he brought home from one of his morning walks. He told me he uses those walks to call his parents back east to catch up. So nice.

He carried the couch all the way from Broadway, half a mile. He was drenched in sweat by the time he got to me, like a hunter hauling a whole buffalo. When he rang the doorbell I answered to see him standing at the base of the stoop, a cigarette dangling out of his mouth and his arms stretched towards the couch, exhausted and elated like a manic magician revealing a “ta da!” That was a few months ago, though.

“What are you on right now?” Asking this I feel disassociated from reality, like I’m auditioning for a part in a soap opera and the director’s gonna call my bluff. My words eek out an octave higher than I intended.

Nothing, he says. Just the Suboxone — the opiate blocker he took so he could go through withdrawals from the pills on his own. He’s done it before. He did it several times before I even knew him, so there. He knows a lot about Suboxone and about other drugs and he’s rattling off all these facts. He’s saying it all with an edge of defensiveness in his voice that sounds an awful lot like fuck you. Like now that I’m onto him he doesn’t have a use for me anymore. Later, when I go through his phone, I’ll see an internet window showing a Google search: “How long after taking Suboxone can I do heroin?”

I listen. I tell myself this isn’t him.

Finally, I say the thing I’ve been saving. The thing my friend who recently became a therapist told me to say. “If you don’t go to rehab right now, I can’t be in your life anymore.”

He sucks in a breath of air and exhales the word, “OK.” No hesitation.

I relax my posture and take his hand in mine. We sit together, for a while. He tells me he loves me. He tells me how powerful heroin is. People who haven’t used it don’t believe it, but it’s the most powerful substance. It’s more powerful than love. That’s the saddest part, he says. It’s more powerful than love. Just is.

*****

Two weeks after Luke and I met: I’m standing in the shower with him, my back against the wall and one leg bent at the knee like a cardboard cutout of a cowboy, watching him. He’s washing his hair with my shampoo. He washes his hair like a cat, hates the water against his face. His eyes are clenched shut and his head bent 90 degrees at the neck so the spray from the showerhead doesn’t splash him. He rubs the shampoo in slowly.

“Listen . . . I’m falling for you,” I say.

He tilts his head up slowly, careful not to get any shampoo in his eyes, then touches my waist.

“Don’t fall down in the shower — you’ll hurt yourself,” he teases. Then he holds my gaze.

“Is it —”

“Yes,” he says. It’s the same for him.

We haven’t made love yet, but we’ve stayed up all night the past three nights talking and kissing. We have a little routine already. I make us bowls of pasta or soup for dinner and we sit on the stoop together, watching people come home from the BART stop a block away. After the sun goes down we walk to Vernon’s Market where he buys single cigarettes, code-named “chicos” —technically illegal to sell but you can get them if you know the secret language.

I know that he used to be an addict. He tells me stories about it. He tells me about how he saw a stranger overdose in a motel room once. About how he called 911 to save the guy’s life even though he assumed he would get arrested in the process. He tells me about times he was hassled by cops when he was holding, bears his teeth to show me what it was like to talk to them with heroin tucked between his lip and his gum. He tells me what it was like coming off, how the worst part of the withdrawals is you can’t sleep, how there’s no escape from the pain, the most excruciating kind you can imagine. Hearing all this doesn’t scare me, it makes me tender. I hold him, and he tells me he’s happy to have a fresh start with me, to be the person he knows he is.

We get out of the shower and he guides me by the hand to my bed. He straddles me and we kiss. Then, with our eyes locked, he pulls back and gently smushes my face up, making my nose into a piggy’s and my lips into two fat pieces of cauliflower. In this moment, with no mask of pretty to rely on, I feel safe being distorted by him. He holds me that way for a few moments, longer than if this was just a gimmick. He smiles tenderly, his golden sand eyes holding my gaze.

“I didn’t think I would find this again,” he tells me.

“I don’t think I’ve ever found this,” I say.

We kiss. I give him hickies on his neck. Later he goes to band rehearsal at his friend’s house. “Looks like you’ve got yourself a little girlfriend,” Travis, the guitar player, teases. Luke comes back and tells me what Travis said and I smile because I know that it’s true.

*****

On the way to the 30-day program in Santa Cruz we stop at Vernon’s Market so Luke can get cigarettes, whiskey, and a Vanilla Coke. I let him buy me a cup of coffee but push down the feeling in my stomach that says I need to eat a snack, too. It’s unlikely he has the money to afford it and I don’t want to make him feel worse than he already does.

I ask him what CD he wants to play on the drive. Oasis. We roll the windows down and I look at him while he sings. We’re about to descend into the Redwood forest on Highway 17 and he’s free for a moment. The center’s still a half hour away. A few minutes later, I look over again and see him sobbing, holding his head in his hands. He’s chugged the whole bottle of whiskey, didn’t even bother to crack open the Coke. “My poor father,” he moans.

Luke knows that I called his dad last night, while Luke was asleep. We’d never spoken before, so once he heard my voice he knew exactly what was going on. “Oh dear,” he said. He had a thick Boston accent. “I don’t know what he’s told you, but this will be his third rodeo.”

Luke told me he only went once before, that since then he’s been clean. He told me that on our second date, at Lake Merritt. His dad told me this has been going “on repeat” for four years. “I figured it was time again because I haven’t been able to get a hold of him for weeks,” he said, disdain drenching his voice.

“He’ll get a couple months, maybe three or four, and he’ll be doing better, but it never lasts.” He sighed. He said he would take the thirteen grand the program costs out of Luke’s inheritance.

In the car, Luke looks out the window at the Redwood trees.

“It’s so fucked up,” he says.

“Tell me,” I say gently. “What’s it like?”

“You don’t wanna know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I have to get fucked up to do anything. People don’t understand. I have to use to get out of bed in the morning, to go to work, to get to your house to hang out with you. To do anything normal I have to —” He starts breaking down, shaking with anxiety. “I have to go and buy from these huge dudes who have been to prison, who carry guns. That’s what I have to do just to feel normal.”

The woman at the rehab remembers him. She has big, wavy hair and a generous smile. She tells him it took her four times before she got clean, and makes a motion with her hand like she’s swatting away a fly. She starts to ask him, “Before we do the intake, do you need to go have a cigarette or —”

“Or?” Luke says, his eyebrows raised conspiratorially. The woman just meets his gaze and shrugs.

“Yeah,” he says flatly. He turns on his heel and walks straight to the bathroom.

When he comes back he’s relaxed. We head to a small conference room where the wavy-haired woman fills out an intake form on a clipboard. I rub Luke’s back. When she says, “You’ve got a very sweet girlfriend,” and he responds, “Yeah, I do,” I beam. She asks about an emergency contact and he looks over at me. I nod and smile reassuringly.

Afterwards, he sits on a chair in the lobby, barricaded by a duffel bag we packed hastily, and my guitar. I’m letting him borrow it while he’s here. We meant to stop and get a capo for him on the drive down but forgot. He’s crying, staring at the ground. It’s time for me to go but he won’t look up at me. I kiss him lightly on the back of his neck and leave.

*****

One morning, about a month into our relationship: We sit on the stoop together and wait for Luke’s ride to work to show up. He started working for a new moving company and his boss makes all the employees wear a long-sleeved black t-shirt with a logo on the back. He thinks he looks stupid but I think he looks cute.

Next to him on the stoop I wear the green flannel button-up he borrowed from his friend Travis at band rehearsal. It became my favorite shirt immediately. That, plus the piece of leather Luke found in a free box and tied around my wrist in a few loops, remind me that I’m his.

His ride pulls up and he stands to go. “Have a good day,” he says, headed for the car.

“Love you.” I say it without thinking, as naturally as if we’d been together for years. I clamp my hand against my mouth. “I just said that out loud.”

He turns and strides purposefully back to me. Bending down, he places one hand on either side of me on the step where I sit. “I love you, too.” He kisses me on the lips, then leaves.

After this we hold off for a couple months, not saying it. One night we get into an argument because he’s hours late getting to my house and won’t explain why. He’s got blood on his ankle, says he scraped it on some brambles in the park across from my place. I take a shower, and when I come out I find a piece of torn notebook paper placed on my bed with the words written across it in all caps. I LOVE YOU. I tack the scrap to the wall above my bed, and we make love beneath it.

*****

Walking out of the rehab center, I feel like I’m walking out of a movie theater showing an apocalypse film in the middle of the afternoon. It’s daylight, there are no crises to manage, and I don’t know what to do with myself. The past 48 hours were spent completely focused on Luke, on damage control. On coaxing some semblance of the truth out of him, packing his duffel bag, strategizing with his dad and his few close friends, keeping my hands on the wheel. Now he’s in there and I’m out here, surrounded by towering Redwood trees and a winding highway that leads back to the life I used to share with him, or thought I did. I put the keys in the ignition and head North.

My ears pop as the elevation changes. I roll the window down and let the late summer air whip my hair around. By the time I hit San Jose with its wide open six-lane freeway I’m singing along to the Oasis CD Luke left in my car, then yelling along, my hands banging the steering wheel.

MAYBE
I DON’T REALLY WANNA KNOW
HOW YOUR GARDEN GROWS
I JUST WANNA FLY.

And then, all of a sudden, something else is happening.

What is happening is that I am suddenly immediately positive the part of me that is inside my body is going to break out of the shell of my skin. I don’t know where it’s going, but I know once it gets out there’s not gonna be any putting it back together. My pulse and my breathing speed up. I feel like I’m running on a treadmill and someone’s cranking it faster and faster and I can’t keep up. I think about Humpty Dumpty. I think about the term “psychotic break.” I think about the fact that I’m driving in six lanes of traffic and need to get the fuck off the road right now.

I repeat the phrase “It’s OK” to myself out loud in quick succession, without time to breathe in between.

“It’sOKIt’sOKIt’sOKIt’sOKIt’sOKIt’sOKIt’sOKIt’sOKIt’sOKIt’sOK.”

I change lanes and change lanes and change lanes and finally I exit.

From an abandoned industrial lot, I call the rehab. The nice wavy-haired woman answers. I’m talking fast, my voice a staccato, panicked. “Something is going on and I don’t know what it is but I need help,” I tell her. “I need a therapist or something, but it has to be someone who understands.”

“Don’t worry. It’s not uncommon to feel this way when you first find out,” she says. “The chaos is . . . a lot.”

“Yeah! The CHAOS!” Wow. Was that what all that was? Him always hours late, losing things, getting in weird disputes with his roommate?

She gives me the number for a local Nar-Anon group. “It’s a twelve-step group for friends and family of addicts.”

*****

Our second date: We sit by Lake Merritt in the sunshine, sharing an orange I brought. “Let’s see how slow we can eat it,” he says. We spend an hour peeling apart each fiber and feeding each other perfectly smooth pieces.

I’m on my back, propped up by my forearms. Luke sits beside me with one arm draped across my torso. He’s sitting so close to me so soon; we are intertwined already. I run one finger over his arm and find a small crater-like scar.

“What's this from?” I ask absently.

He fingers it and looks down. “Promise you won’t leave?”

I feel, for an instant, a pinprick of instinct telling me to say no. No, I barely know you. Why would I promise that?

“I promise,” I say.

“I used to be a —” He clears his throat, looks away, searches the willow trees around us. “A heroin addict,” he says. “But I’ve been clean for two years.”

*****

Pulled off the road, I remember this moment. I see his face in my memory and see it change. I see his nose get longer, pointier, and his eyes more sunken. The willow trees around us in my memory seem to whisper, He’s lying to you. He’s an addict. He’s been an addict this whole time. Thoughts flood my mind. What if he was always using? What if he was using that day, while he sat there next to me in the sunshine and told me it was in his past? What if nothing he ever said was true? What if he is HIV positive? What if he was just using me this whole time, for food, a place to stay? What if he doesn’t give a shit about me and the voice in his head — the one who urged him to go talk to me the first time he saw me, the one we both decided was God — was not God at all but just the voice of his addiction, saying, There she is, there’s your target — aim, fire?

When I get home I stand in my room and stare at the scrap of notebook paper on the wall. I see his handwriting. I LOVE YOU. I try to do a calculation to figure out if he was using when he wrote that, if that’s why he wrote that, if he meant it at all, if it was even him — the real him — who wrote that, if I ever met that person at all. There are no answers, though, just a labyrinth of questions upon questions.

Before I know it, I’m bent at the waist, tearing through a pile of his clothes. I’m combing through all of it, every pocket. I don’t know what it will look like if I find any, but I tell myself I’ll know it when I see it. I come upon his winter coat. My mom came to visit last month and the three of us decided to go on a walk to Lake Merritt. It was cold out. I went to get his coat for her to borrow, but he rushed to me and whispered into my ear, “She shouldn't wear that. It smells like cigarette smoke.”

I put the coat on. I button it up, then crouch down on the ground in a ball, letting it envelop me. It smells like him. Cigarettes, yes, it reeks of them, he was right. But underneath that, or instead, if I focus right, it just smells like him. His sweet, tangy natural odor. Oranges.

Slowly I reach into the pockets. I find some folded-up BART cards in one, a cherry red lighter in the other. Both pockets have old Q-tips in them, white sticks with the cotton partially torn off.

Weeks later I’ll spend hours searching the internet for the signs of heroin addiction. Signs I missed, or was too naive to look for, or willfully, subconsciously ignored. Q-tips going missing is one of them. Apparently addicts use the cotton to filter heroin before shooting. In this moment, though, all I can think about is how the Q-tips were mine. It was a small thing, but all the small things have started to add up in my mind the past couple months. He always showers at my house and uses my shampoo. He borrows my socks for work and doesn’t return them. I buy and cook dinner for us almost every night. The Q-tips finally ran out a couple weeks ago and I didn’t buy a new box. I was waiting to see if he stepped up. Now they’re all gone and so is he.

Still wearing his coat, I march to the wall where I’ve tacked the I LOVE YOU paper. The small voice of my instinct, seeing his handwriting, grows tender and pleads for me not to do this.

I rip the paper off the wall. I take it into the shower and pull the red lighter out of his coat pocket. Crouched down, still enveloped in his sweet smell, I set the love note on fire. Its charred remains hover around the drain for the next few days. Each time I clean myself I lose more.

*****

At the Nar-Anon meeting they save the last 10 minutes for newcomers to speak. Travis and I are the newcomers, and he speaks first. I asked him to come with me tonight because I’m scared to go alone, and I’ve come to realize he’s been through this dance with Luke for years.

“Hi, I’m Travis.” As he speaks he keeps his eyes fixed down on the table in front of him. He stands out in the crowd of elderly women, modestly dressed in sweaters with pastel polo collars peeking out. A paper plate with a mandala of homemade lemon bars and macaroons rests on the table in front of him.

“I’m here for my friend,” he says. He runs his hand through his hair and grabs a fistful to hold onto while he forms his thoughts. “He’s, ah, he’s a friend who I’ve known a long time. We’ve played in bands together and we moved out here together from the East Coast. We’ve, uh, we’ve been through a lot. He’s a bit younger than me and I would never tell him this ’cause it’d embarrass him, but I’ve always thought of him as a little brother. Neither of us has any siblings.” He tells the group he is worried, and that he’s used in the past but he wants to stay clean so he can set a better example for his friend.

The ladies nod. They get it. It’s sweet that he’s here, with his wild curly hair and his jean jacket with the sleeves ripped off and frayed, the patches for bands covering the front pockets, his motorcycle boots. His presence here ups the cool factor of the group by several decibels.

Me, I’ve got circles under my eyes and I haven’t eaten in three days. Just protein powder mixed with lukewarm water, hot water and honey if I’m feeling up to it. Travis got me a tea when we first got here. On the drive over, after I picked him up from West Oakland, he suggested we stop and he bought me a piece of pizza. The next day he’ll text me: “Make sure you’re eating, OK? Knock it off with that techie protein shit.” It’s fucked up but I think, here’s somebody who can take care of me. Maybe I could date Travis.

There are still five minutes left in the meeting when Travis finishes talking. It’s my turn. I say hi and my name. The group says hi back to me, in unison. Whereas Travis spoke declaratively, reporting on the fact of the situation and of his feelings, my words are coated in a skin of apprehension. I say I’m here because of my boyfriend. Or my ex-boyfriend, maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t feel sure about much anymore because I recently found out he lied to me about a lot of stuff, including the amount of time he had been clean before the two of us started dating. I thought he had two years, but it turned out he barely had a month.

I feel sick to my stomach. My heart starts beating fast and anger swells suddenly in me. “It wasn’t worth it,” I declare, my voice finding firmness. “I need to pay more attention, in the future. I need to look out for myself. Nobody else is going to.” Around the room heads nod in understanding. “Keep coming back,” they say in a chorus.

I drive Travis back to his house and we park out front, sitting in silence for a moment. Travis starts combing his hair with his hands, rubbing his temples. He wants to know something.

“Did you find it a little intriguing, his past? The fact that he was a heroin addict?”

I think about it for a few moments. I suppose it was. A little bit. Maybe more than a little bit.

This is a problem for Travis. He scratches his head harder and stares out the window. He can’t look at me, won’t.

“You know, sometimes people will wanna date someone with a kind of dark past, something like that, because they find it intriguing. They wanna gain some wisdom or have a story to tell at dinner parties. As soon as shit gets real they’re out. And if that’s what you — I don’t know if you guys are in love or whatever —”

“We were. We are. I love him.”

Travis just sighs. “Yeah, well, he’s a person. He’s not a story to tell.”

*****

Our first date: A concert at Revolution Cafe. Luke gives me his pack of cigarettes to hold while he’s onstage, playing drums in his friend’s band. Before he goes on he pulls me close — it’s loud and he wants to make sure I hear — and tells me this isn’t his band. It’s his friend Travis’s band. These aren’t his songs. Drums aren’t his main instrument, either. He had a band once. It would have been great if I could have seen them, but they’re not together anymore. Some stuff happened.

“I’m sure I’ll like it,” I say.

“It’s OK if you don’t.” He smiles and his eyes twinkle.

When their set ends Luke comes straight to find me. I tell him I liked the show. And I did. I liked the music, but more than that I liked being there, in a strange, small venue with peeling paint on the walls and Christmas lights up in September, and tea and whiskey in paper cups. A place I never would have gone into tonight if he hadn’t brought me here.

I give him his cigarettes. He puts his arm around my shoulders and leads me to a tall wooden chair on the back patio. The chair swivels around so he sets me spinning and pretends he’s a barber. He reaches for the hair falling over my shoulders and gently lays it flat across my back. I shiver as his fingers graze my bare neck for the first time. “What’ll it be?” he asks.

“Just a trim today, I think.”

“Just a trim, huh?” He strokes his chin. “Hmm. I think you’re bolder than you know. I’m thinking something more edgy. A mohawk.”

I agree to this and with his clenched fist as the razor he runs it over my scalp, fluttering his lips in a buzzing noise, cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips. When he finishes he spins me around and holds up his palm like a mirror for me to look into. But the mirror, it’s just pretend. I can’t see myself. All I can see is him.

*****

Allis Perry writes nonfiction essays, journalism, and songs. She has also worked as a delivery driver, field laborer, waitress, and marketer. She lives in Colorado and she does not have a cat.

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