So Sad Today by Melissa Broder

Author:Melissa Broder
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2016-03-15T06:00:00+00:00

One Text Is Too Many and a Thousand Are Never Enough

I’M TRYING TO QUIT GETTING high on people. It’s really fucking hard. I’m a romantic and an addict. I crave eros, fantasy, and intrigue. I’m wired for longing. But I keep getting really sick. Longing-sick.

When you keep getting sick, you start to get tired of it. Eventually, you might be like: This isn’t working. I’m done. I want to be okay. But it’s taking me a lot of failed attempts to make any progress.

Also, getting clean off of people isn’t the same as getting sober off of alcohol and drugs. Since I’m an alcoholic, there are very clear boundaries as to what I don’t do. I can’t text alcohol. Dealers don’t send nudes. What’s more, alcohol and drugs are pervasive in America, but people are even more pervasive. People are everywhere. Hot people. You can abstain from alcohol and drugs. You can’t abstain from people.

I think everyone is entitled to love, even those of us seeking to quit getting high on people. But this isn’t about love. This is about using people as drugs. It took me a while, but I’m beginning to get the difference. Now, when I become romantically obsessed with a person without really knowing them (or ever having met them) that signals danger for me. It’s a red alert. If I feel those first fantastical pangs, I disengage.

It’s sad to disengage. It’s not poetic or musical. It’s not what art tells me is valuable (at least the art I like). I want love at first sight to be real. But I fall in love at first sight every day. Also, love at first sext. There will never be enough sexts to sate my longing. The higher I get, the worse the comedown is.

Recently I blocked the most intense drug-people in my phone. It’s been hard to do this, especially with one particular drug-person who always treated me with kindness and respect.

With this drug-person, there was genuine love. I would say we were both in love but also got fucked up on each other. So I suffered a lot, in spite of the love, because you can’t make a drug-person not be a drug-person no matter how wonderful they are. What fed the drugginess was that distance, and other factors, assured we would never be able to really be together. Neither of us were really available. So we were in a constant state of longing—of almost touching—like Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” but with iPhones.

The truth is, distance and unavailability—flecked with short-lived, gorgeous IRL binges—were what made the drug-person so intoxicating. I wanted more of the drug-person than could ever be available. When I didn’t get a text, I was, as junkies say, sick. When I received a text it made me well. But it only made me well until the next text I sent. Then I was waiting for him. I was sick again.

If I could be eternally and omnipotently texted, I might not have had to quit the drug-person.

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