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i guess you did--i just reread the main story.
i must have figured that this is an emotionally over-determined space for you, quite apart from the fiasco itself that you talk about.
anyway, this does not sound that alien to me.
i had the singular pleasure of encountering more or less similar situations as i was walked through the various phases of disintegration of my housemate when i was in graduate school. what it sounds like is that you are seeing the addiction creeping more and more into spaces that might earlier have been understood as safe, as constituting boundaries that gave the g/f the impression that she was in control.
if my experience is any guide, the strangest thing about this kind of scenario is how little you can do about it. i tried for 3 years to get my old housemate off the pipe. it worked, then it didnt, then it did, then it became impossible to know what was going on, then he vanished then he died.
the only thing i do not understand, really, is your ex's relationship with the g/f at this point: i wonder if there is something of a martyrdom thing going on with him. because there is nothing he can do to alter the g/f's situation. it will probably deteriorate until it completely wipes him out...the obvious response (reading the above, thinking about my experience) would be to walk away.
this is probably all obvious.
walking away was the hardest thing i have ever had to do. it ran against everything--my devotion to my friends, my sense of what is entailed when you love someone, my desire to fix situations, my sense of my own agency---it was really difficult to admit that i was helpless to do anything meaningful. i tried too--it cost me thousands of dollars trying to move him to another city, get him set up closer to his familiy, sending money to get him through the transition, talking for hours and hours on the phone from san fransisco to south carolina---in itself, i would not normally mention any of this, you know?---i did all of it willingly, without hesitation---but in the end, i think, it only functioned to blunt the edges of a sense of powerlessness on my part.
which in the end i had to accept, with all the lingering guilt (which still plagues me) that it entails.
i wish you the best of luck, shani.
and i wish i had things more upbeat to relay to you.
i really do.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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