Sad Moment

I have to dump my new best girlfriend.

We will call him Hoover here. Yes, him. Hoover is actually a guy, but he was nonetheless a good girlfriend - we laughed our asses off, gabbed about who we were dating and (who he was) sleeping with, went trail running together, bitched about our bosses, showed each other our new clothes from shopping, and talked on the phone and texted a million times a day.

But now he has to go... Hoover has a cocaine problem that just keeps getting the best of him. And it's really disturbing my own serentiy and sobriety.

I have known Hoover since January, but have only been invested in this friendship for approximately two months. I regret it already. I tried to avoid being friends altogether once I found out about his cocaine use, but Hoover is charming and persistent and makes me want to hug him and do whatever I can do to help him. He's sort of like a Dennis the Menace - he wreaks havoc in his own life, and thus in the lives of people around him. But you adore him anyway because he is irresistably cute and helpless, as only a child can be.

And it has been my life's pattern to find guys exactly like this, and try to save their souls. I'm on dangerous ground here.

Like I told him when I explained why we couldn't date: I AM FINISHED WITH FIXER-UPPERS. I am over it. I have enough broken and needy people in my life already (like my family, for instance, see previous blogs for hillbilly updates), that I do not need to run right out and augment my stable of people who NEED something from me to make their own lives whole.

Hoover was attracted to my sobriety - he basks in its presence. ... Until he runs out and hoovers up a bunch of cocaine and disappears for a week.

I just can't consent to be the palliative presence entre-temps.

It hurts me to see my friends hurt themselves. I cried last week when I found out he was out on a binge. We had just run 5 miles the day before and he was so proud of himself for being in the "double digits," as he said, on his number of days of sobriety. He had two weeks under his belt. And he went out that nght after our run and gave all that up...

Hoover is a new friend. I think I have to let him go now before I go into the Savior Mode of my former self, the one where I concentrate on fixing what's wrong with everyone else so much that I forget about all the things that I have to work on for myself, in myself. Hoover can only offer a one-sided friendship that will drain the life out of me. It's already starting. I'm losing sleep over his problems!

So, he's got to go.

G'bye Hoover. I'll miss you.