Down the Rabbit Hole

I only know....

It is hard to look into your deep brown eyes and not see the face of the child I comforted through night terrors. It is hard
to listen your voice and not hear the echo of that troubled child in all the toxic rhetoric, self-deprecation and tearful admissions. It is hard to steel myself against the need to comfort the aching adult in the wake of more poor decisions and unfortunate choices. It is all so familiar, this language of dependency and self-loathing. After living with an alcoholic for five years, after trying desparately to hold our lives together with the last shred of my own sanity, after watching him die so badly, I have learned the hard lesson of the importance of living without expectations. Is this a valid enough excuse for not wrapping my arms around the wounded? For not investing myself in another life lost and drifting? Does it absolve me from at least trying to save you from yourself? I don't know. I only know I can not audit the same litany of broken promises, guilt-ridden confessions, angry outbursts. I only know I can not watch you drown yourself in the same cesspool of addiction. I only understand that I can not live through burying someone else I love that way again.