“I would just like to talk to her.  If I could just get her to meet with me, get her to see that I’m getting better, I think it would show her that I’ve changed, that I’m willing to do whatever it takes to be in her life.“

“Okay, I see that we still have plenty to work on here.”

And so it went.  Little by little, I began to accept that it really could be over between us.  Not as a break, but as a permanent affliction.

It was a very rough pill to swallow.

It was months before I could open up in group therapy.  Months of hearing other people’s stories.  Some of them didn’t seem too bad, but others were worse than mine were.

One lady, a he**in addict, opened up about neglecting her baby for so long that it died in its crib while she got high.

I processed that story for a while, haunted by the way she told it, as though it had happened to someone else.

Something in her disconnect really got to me.

Had I disconnected that much from my own life?  And if so, how?  How could I have been so selfish, so cruel, as to neglect the things around me for so long?

It was numbness I’d been looking for, what we’d all been looking for, and that numbness had turned us into monsters when we used.

I had to come to terms with the things the monster inside of me had done.  And with the fact that I was that monster.

It was as I began to cope with that realization, to accept it, that I began to open up in group.

“I’m Tristan.  I am an alcoholic and a drug addict.  I’m here because using cost me the love of my life.”

I smiled sadly as I looked down at my hands.  “I think I started falling for her the first time she called me a man-whore.”

It hadn’t been easy to set up the meeting.  She wouldn’t talk to me directly, so everything went through a very slow filter via Jerry.  We constantly met up with complications.

It took months just to get the ball rolling.

She wouldn’t even meet with me alone, as though I was some kind of dangerous criminal.

I tried not to dwell on that.

It messed with me, my sanity, my will to stay sober, but I had to focus on the positive.

I rounded up a few friends I’d met in rehab.

Trinity was a twenty-year-old he**in addict whose parents had already put her through rehab four times.  Her current clean run was the longest she’d been sober since she was fifteen years old.  She was a sweet, funny girl, and I had hopes that this time she’d pull through.

She was a compact girl, and wore a uniform black T-shirt and jeans.  Her short red hair was only long in the front, long enough to cover one eye, but she still managed make good eye contact.

Todd was a twenty-five-year-old tattoo artist and a pain killer addict.  We wound up in the same sober house after rehab.  He was a small guy, skinny, with bleach blond hair and enough tats to make me look like a blank canvas.

I’d made the fastest friends in rehab, but unfortunately, many of them weren’t lasting friends.  Nearly everyone I’d met had relapsed within the last eight months.  The ones that stayed sober with me, though, were like a lifeline, very necessary for my own recovery process.

Trinity and Todd were both still staying clean after rehab, still fighting the good fight, like me.  They were ideal company for me, going through the same things I was, and so they could understand how hard the coming meeting was for me.

They’d been in group therapy with me, so they knew all about my obsession with Danika, and all of the reasons she had to hate me.

We got there early, because I just couldn’t wait around any longer.  I was jittery with nerves.  Wound up so tight that I couldn’t sit still.

I’d been waiting, obsessed, tormented, consumed for this meeting since the last time I’d seen her.  It simply couldn’t end like this.  There had to be something more, something I could do to make amends.

Even if I couldn’t be her husband, I longed to have her in my life.  In any capacity.

I’d take literally anything.

I wouldn’t be happy with less than everything, but I’d take what I could get.

Crumbs, scraps, a taste of what she once felt for me, as a salve for what I still felt in abundance for her.

Even that I would take.

My hands were shaking so hard that I spilled coffee on my hands as I tried to take a sip of the decaf coffee I’d ordered just to have something to do with my hands.

As we sat there and waited for her, the future so uncertain, no, so likely to turn out in a way I couldn’t bear, I’d never wanted a drink more in my life.

I shared this piece of information.  It was part of the process, to reach out when you felt yourself slipping.  It still went against the grain for me, but I was trying my best to learn a new way.

Obviously, the old way hadn’t been working for me.  Not by any wild stretch of the imagination.

“Well, hell, man, let’s hit the bar then.  It’s five o’clock somewhere.”  Todd said it as a joke, and that levity was what I needed.

I burst out laughing and so did Trinity.

I was facing the door of the place, on lookout, and so I saw her first.

I froze.  Every part of my body just seized up as I set eyes on her.  At first it, was just at the shock, the sheer joy of seeing her beautiful face, even from several feet away, through a glass door.

Some man opened it for her, and I took her in for one heart stopping moment.