Regrets

Another blast from the past. Here was a good-bye letter I wrote to my late Jimmy when I had a little over 100 days clean. I am so thankful that I am in a more serene place today.

Dearest Jimmy,
I can't change the past. No matter how much I want to go back there. I can't. I have to accept that. I have to accept that I was the person that I was then and I cannot change that. You are dead. I cannot make you alive so that I can make amends to you. I know that it would be more convenient for me if that were the case. It would be more convenient for me if you didn't get your fucking head blown off in the prime of your life and at the height of my addiction so that my selfish self-centered ass wouldn't have to be sitting here two years later worried about how you wasted the last three and a half years of your beautiful life with some sorry piece of shit that wrote such horrible things about you just a few short months before you died. I said in the pages of my journal that I never loved you. That I just wanted out. That you embarrassed me. That I wasn't attracted to you. That we never touched or kissed - that there was no love there anymore. I don't remember that, baby. I don't remember writing such hateful things. I'm so fucking sorry. I was so sick. I was the embarrassment - and still, still you didn't leave me. I wasn't functioning at all and still you loved me. Things got better just before you died, didn't they? I can hardly remember...it's been so long. I can remember just a week or two of us getting along really well - almost like a blessing. Things were really bad there for a while, for a long time, but I feel like right before you left - those last two weeks or so, we had a really good time, didn't we? At Maureen's wedding, at the Halloween party, the day before you died when you stopped by at lunch to say goodbye and do your happy dance...what a fucking blessing. I mean a blessing straight from God. But, before that...the shit I put you through. I am so ashamed. My behavior was inexcusable. I held you to bullshit standards. I expected you to be 100% honest with me and then I was dishonest as hell. I tried to control you and manipulate you and change you into someone you could never be...never stopping for one second to simply enjoy the person you were. Inexcusable. I don't understand how you put up with me. Why did you? Why, baby? I don't understand. Where you afraid that I would die without you? Did you feel sorry for me? Did you feel trapped? Did you think that I would someday get better? I have so many unanswered questions. So many unresolved issues. Do I just let them go? Do I just accept that that chapter of my life will just have to go unfinished? No closure? But I have a writer's mind. I can't just leave a chapter unfinished.....can I?