NOVEMBER, 1993, SEATTLE, WA
NOVEMBER DAWNED UPON Seattle with a slew of cold rain and grey skies, two things that accurately represented Lindy's mood as she coped with the turmoil stirring inside her heart.
Kurt's overdose in her bathroom had driven a bitter wedge between them both. He'd broken a rule that Lindy had given him many months prior; that rule was that he could not, he would not bring heroin into their safe place. But yet he'd done it anyway, succumbing to his insatiable need and forgetting his promise to her.
She'd been upset at first. Of course she'd been upset. She had watched him die before her very eyes. She had lost him and brought him back in the span of minutes feeling nothing except torture the entire time.
Lindy had moved past her anger eventually, finding it hard to bottle up her rage for so long. She figured that some people might have called her crazy for forgiving Kurt for what he'd done, but she'd already come to terms with being crazy. Being with Kurt drove her crazy in more ways than one. But she loved him nonetheless -- she had learned the ins and outs of his addiction like the pattern of a complicated, unsolvable puzzle.
Loving someone with an addiction, Lindy had learned, meant putting aside the expectation that they were in control of their own selves. At some point, the addiction developed a mind of its own and the person suffering lost the autonomy of making good choices. Kurt had proven this to her.
She couldn't excuse Kurt's behavior and she struggled to forgive him, but it was something that she had come to realize in the time she'd spent laying in bed, her eyes adjusting in and out of the darkness. If you loved someone, if you loved them truly with every ounce of love in your heart, you would see their soul for what it really was. Their struggles became your own. It was a covenant of loving someone honestly.
Lindy knew that Kurt had not stuck that needle in his arm that day with a careless dismissal of his promise to her. He loved her too and he would have never tried to hurt her, to spatter what they shared together with lies and deceit. It was the addiction. It had virtually eaten him alive and taken the reigns of his mind. When his craving struck, which it so often did those days, the real Kurt floated far away into oblivion.
Some may have called her a pushover. She didn't care.
Lindy had come to greatly understand what she was dealing with when it came to her renewed involvement with the man she loved more than life. The addict whom she adored, who had laid broken and near-dead on her bathroom floor, was still the same man that she'd fallen in love with as a young adult. Nothing would ever change the steadfast way that Lindy had always cared for Kurt. Not even the enemy in their lives that was heroin.
They'd patched things up right before he left on tour. Lindy had nearly considered sending him off without so much as a goodbye; she wondered if 'tough love' would be a good lesson for him. But then she remembered Wendy and that she was not like the people of his past. She would not hurt him, even if he had hurt her.
Lindy refused to leave Kurt emotionally stranded as nearly everyone else in his life had. Like Trae said — she could have walked away. She could have apologized to him and explained that it had gone too far. She could have shuffled him out of her apartment and closed the door and never turned on MTV again where she would always see his terribly beautiful face and hear the sound of his lullaby voice calling out to her.
But she would never do that.
He looked weaker than he ever had when they'd said their goodbyes, hanging his arms loosely around Lindy's waist in an attempt at a hug.
