In 2012 I was heavily addicted to heroin. Over a girl because I was young and dumb, but heavily addicted is heavily addicted. My then-best friend was a relatively prolific drug dealer who supplied most of this junk to me, and I saw he had housed a girl who was abused by her previous dealer and needed a place to stay. She was gorgeous. Beautiful Latina girl who--even for a girl even harder into the junk than I was--had a very easy on the eyes figure. We hit it off almost immediately and decided to get sober together. We both figured we were young enough to salvage what was left of ourselves and we went on. And by the grace of God we got there. Man alive was it excruciatingly hard but God damn it we got there.
She, my best friend and I went on to have some of the best times of my life. We saved up thousands of dollars to take a road trip to Miami and get out of our shitty existence in Oklahoma and we had the time of our lives. We stayed sober and still managed to party like fiends. It felt like we were out of the woods.
Until three weeks after we got back home. Me and my best friend went to the Quik Trip down the road to get some stuff and came back find her on the floor with a needle in her arm, half conscious and not exactly improving. Everything afterwards is a blur but the gist of it is, we carried her dead weight down to the car and raced off to the hospital, but by the time we got there she wasn't coming back. She looked me in my eyes and told me she loved me and as far as I can remember that was the last thing I heard from her. The only reason I know it was suicide is because she had a half assed note in her phone dated the time we got back to the apartment to find her. I saved that note for years and just got around to deleting it recently.
Afterwards you can probably imagine I wasn't drug free for long. My then best friend confessed to me he sold her the shit and so I lost my mind. I stole every drug he had stashed and went back to my parents house with it, concealing my drug abuse for a good nine months. I haven't talked to him since and I still find myself hoping he never finds happiness again for it. I told people for a while he died so I didn't have to talk about it but he's out there somewhere. I can say I've been sober since May 15th, 2013 and happier than I've ever been. I never thought I could be, and I still miss her every day of my life. But I can deal now and it gets easier as I go.