Idiot - Laura Clery Page 0,75
of the most time-honored institutions in human history . . . the sexless marriage?”
She looked at me sympathetically. “It helps.”
I just stared at her, dumbfounded. “Thanks?” I shut the door.
I later found out that Stephen had stopped going to meetings. He stopped praying and meditating and calling his sponsor in the morning. He wasn’t using the tools we had both built for ourselves. Those steps are like insulin for a diabetic; if we weren’t actively doing them, we were getting sicker. In the absence of those tools, the voice of his addiction got really loud, and suddenly, just like I had during my relapse, he had forgotten the healthy tools he had used to solve life’s problems. Suddenly, he didn’t know how to deal with his stress. He became riddled with anxiety and fear that he couldn’t cope with.
Soon enough, a psychiatrist was prescribing him anti-anxiety medication and sleeping pills. In the back of his mind, he knew that he didn’t have the ability to take this kind of medication safely. He knew, but he also needed the pain and bad feelings to stop. There was another way to do this, but he couldn’t remember it. He just needed to be able to work. He could tackle his deeper issues later on, right? He just needed to get this music cue out to Hans, now.
Before he knew it, he had relapsed. He was abusing the medication. One day, I was working in the kitchen and Stephen was in the bathroom. I heard the faint rattling of a pill bottle. Immediately, I understood what was going on.
He was going completely insane, and I didn’t know what to do about it. He wouldn’t listen to me anymore. He would take his bike out at three in the morning to “get some French fries at Swingers” and come back completely bloody and fucked up. There was one morning that I was leaving for an important shoot. We were shooting a pilot that I wrote. This was big for me! As I grabbed my keys, Stephen began to smash his head into the door, threatening to kill himself if I left. It was such a fucked-up time. I was scared. I pulled him into the car with me and dropped him off at the emergency room, not knowing whether he would be dead or alive when I got back. I knew I couldn’t help him. Addiction is something that you can only pull yourself out of. It’s the only way.
I called Kristal and told her what was happening. I knew that I couldn’t be around him if he was using. With Stephen’s sobriety gone, I immediately knew that my sobriety was at risk too. Though I never stopped loving him, I couldn’t be with an active addict, and I didn’t sign up to take this sort of abuse. It wouldn’t be long before his addiction would transfer onto me. I started looking for an apartment to move into alone.
I didn’t tell him anything because of how emotionally unstable he was. He was threatening to kill himself. After hearing that so often in my past from Damon, the threat felt very real to me. I didn’t feel safe telling him I was leaving, but I found a small place in Venice and contacted them to rent it.
The day before I had planned to leave, Stephen came home, panicked and out of breath and fucked up. Completely fucked up. But behind his eyes there was a glimmer of him. He wasn’t completely gone, I could tell.
He spoke rapidly. “I’m done. I’m done. I’m done. I can’t do this anymore. I heard a voice and it told me to stop and I have to stop. I have to stop.” He ran into the bathroom, took his bottle of Xanax and flushed all the pills down the toilet. Which by the way, you’re not supposed to do. It’s bad for the ocean. Sorry, fishies.
Maybe he subconsciously knew that I was leaving. I’m not sure. We got into bed that night, and he was shaking and twitching and sweating. He looked so sick, like he was on the verge of something really bad. He was staring at the ceiling completely terrified, flinching every so often. I didn’t know what he was seeing. He took my hand. “There’s dark clouds all around me. I’m scared, Laura.”
I was so scared. I got out of bed and called a friend in the program. Frantically I told her that Stephen had thrown all