A year ago, it wasn’t you that I was addicted to, it was what I had left of you. How sweet your words tasted on my lips, how close the memories were in dreams, how ephemeral, how permanent, how familiar, how distant.

And when I looked at you, a year ago, I didn’t see a scrawny boy with wide eyes and a beautiful, fleeting smile. I saw the anchor onto which I threw the last shreds of my sanity. I saw the prison into which I locked my worst emotions, and I saw the warden, to whom I forced the key. I saw the physical embodiment of depression, depression that became my own under the intentional neglect of the only person I would have ever trusted to save me from such a fate.

A year ago, it wasn’t you that I was addicted to, it was what I had left of you. But now, I’m addicted to what I’m slowly getting back.

The occasional moments in which we are united by our mutual disgust. The evenings where I watch your eyes get redder and redder and wonder if it is because you’re tired or upset, and why you’re tired, and why you’re upset.

The days when you call me retarded and then apologize quickly. The days when I tell you, I like your haircut, and you turn away, selectively deaf as usual.

The days when I bear witness to your faults, and we are once again united by a mutual knowledge of each others’ worst attributes. The days where we jump to condemn each other, all the while making obvious how much we understand in just a glance.

The laughter that we share, although we know that later, the taste of the laughter will bring tears.

Now, when I look at you, I do not see a scrawny boy with wide eyes and a beautiful, fleeting smile. I see the red eyes and careless insults and the fleeting immorality and the bitter imperfections that will never be “perfect imperfections,” the way they are in songs and things.

And I see the boy who asked me, five, ten, fifteen days in a row, are you okay, even when the answer was, five, ten, fifteen times, no, please, talk to me, stay with me. I see the boy who listened as I poured out every whim to ever paralyze a teenager: I’m not smart enough, I’m not attractive enough, I’m not funny enough, I’m inherently not and will never be enough.

And some of the more serious things too - I don’t believe in god, I don’t believe in love, I don’t believe in life, I simply don’t believe anymore - and I see the boy who laughed at everything I said, because he’d been there already, but who listened, because nobody had listened to him.

And I see the boy who used to share with me pieces of the most precious bits of him, the pain and the rage and the sincerity, the rawness, the openness.

I look at you… and I see, finally, you.