It could have been worse, I know.

Of course, it shouldn’t have happened at all.

“So, why?” he asks.

“Isn’t it the same with every addict?” I ask this of him not to be facetious, but out of curiosity.

“It might seem like that on the outside,” he says. “And I’m not an addiction specialist. I work with children mostly, as you know. But I have a feeling that regardless of the similarities between people and their addictions, the closer you get, the more differences appear.”

“It was easier,” I say. “I didn’t think as much.”

“Took the edge off?”

“You could say that, I guess. More like I didn’t care what edges there were. And even if they were there, they were blurred, so I couldn’t find reason to care.”

“What drugs were you given, specifically?”

He knows this already, I think, but he’s trying to gauge my sincerity. Unfortunately, addicts are known liars. Not because they want to be, but because it’s just the way it is. It’s hard to trust someone when they’re high or trying to cover the fact that they are. “Started with Xanax. It wasn’t working, so I was given Klonopin instead.” The difference is like starting with a match and then being given a piece of dynamite.

“Why wasn’t Xanax working?”

Another trap of sorts. He’s wanting to know if the high wasn’t high enough. It was. The Xanax was never about that. I shrug. “I still couldn’t breathe.”

“Did you do the exercises I taught you?”

“I tried. Sometimes it worked. Most of the time it didn’t. It probably didn’t help that I was hiding the panic attacks as much as possible from Bear and Otter.”

“Why?”

I pick at the armrest of the chair. “I didn’t want them to worry.”

“The panic attacks continued.”

“Yes. Maybe not with the same severity, but yes.”

“Meditation? Yoga?”

I shook my head. “I was never very good at either of those, Eddie. You know that. My mind works too fast to focus like that.”

“And the Klonopin helped with that?”

I hesitate here, because “help” is more of a euphemism than anything else. If by “helped” he means I was stoned most of the time and could rarely find a single fuck to give, then yes, it helped. I was Robot Tyson and Zombie Tyson, and though I tried my damnedest not to show it, I know my eyes had dulled and I spoke more slowly. Robot Tyson moved through life as if underwater. Zombie Tyson couldn’t be bothered with paying attention in class.

“I don’t know about ‘helped’,” I say slowly. “It was more of a means to an end.”

“How so?”

“I was hurting. The drugs helped me to not hurt. It was very self-serving.”

“Such things usually are,” he says with no recrimination in his voice. “Do you think you would have stopped on your own?”

“Hard to say.”

“Try.”

I sigh. “Maybe? Probably. I like to think I would have.”