Be My Heroin

Chapter 6

It was already night time and I was still in the bathroom when I realized I had went almost a whole day without doing heroin. I opened the door hoping not to wake Gunner, but he had already waken up. I turned around to shut the door back so he couldn't see my face, but I knew he was staring at me. I didn't know how long he had been awake, but I knew I had been hidden in the bathroom for a few hours.

"Mam, he siad, I am really thirsty."

He thinks I am his nurse or something I thought to myself.

I made the split decision to go get him some water assuming he didn't recognize me from the other day.

When I came back in the room with the cup of water he sat up in his bed and looked at me with his eyebrows lowered and his head tilted.

"Hey, I remember you," He said in his still chirpy voice. Im still not sure why he seemed so happy when he just about died, but then again maybe it was because he didn't die.

"You do?" I said of all things.

"Who wouldn't remember you?" He asked.

"You would be surprised," I said.

"It doesn't matter if only one out of a hundred people remember you, he said, quality over quantity."

I watched him as he took his hair down. It was mid-length, brown and shaggy. His eyes were a dark, earthy brown. I could tell he was around six foot, give or take a few inches because he struggled to keep his feet cozy on the hospital bed. He wasn't muscular like I had imagined at one time he might have been, but he was quite slim probably from the drug use.

I didn't answer him so he took it upon himself to say..

"I didn't take you for the nurse type when I seen you, he said, now I'm a little embarrassed seeing as you have probably seen my bare ass."

I laughed and imagined I had.

"Im not a nurse, I said, and I didn't see anything."

I bite my tongue for a moment because maybe seeing his bare ass would be had better than telling him I had witnessed one of his near death experiences. I assumed he had been here more than once, because the first time you are scared and all the others you feel lucky that you beat the drug.

He looked concern and I felt as though he looked at me differently in that moment.

I wanted to lie to him God I really did.

I felt my toes start to curl but they straightened back out and I began to explain myself and what I had seen and what I said to Crystal. I knew what was coming next the judging, the look of disgust and the your no better than me speech, and him asking what drug consumed my life.

I stood up to wait on my signal to leave.

"What made you want to help me." He asked me.

I didn't have an answer for that kind of question. I usually spend my time defending my own faults not someone else's. I didn't know wether to open with sarcasm or tell him what I really felt.

I thought about telling him I felt a connection with him in the strangest way. I wasn't sure why but he made me think that change might just be something good.

So instead I answered him firmly.

"Well to be honest when I seen you laying there I thought there goes my chance of someone ever offering me ketchup again."

Only a true drug addict would see the love in that statement and he must have been the truest because he smiled and said, "I will offer you a lifetime of ketchup for saving my life."

And oddly thats how we started.