by Michy Lynn

Created on: August 09, 2009

The piece that follows was written over 10 years ago now. I wrote it while I was in a relationship with a man who treated me with love and respect, but he used drugs. Occasional marijuana use turned into snorting cocaine, and led to freebasing coke, and that lead to other things.

As his world fell around him, I tried to save him. For two more years after the drug abuse worsened, we continued an on again off again relationship. Eventually, the toll this drug abuse had on the relationship became too much for me, and I had to walk away.

Today, he and I are friends, good friends even, and I still care deeply for him, though I have moved on with my life. Sometimes, I will see him and my heart flip flops, with a mixture of emotion between sorrow and wistful regret that I cannot fix him, cannot save him. Each year goes by, and he looks worse and worse. My heart wants to reach out and pick him up, but having broken away from my codependency, I know beyond doubt that I cannot save him.

Anyone who has experienced codependency, no matter the cause (it's not always drugs or alcohol) will probably understand the feelings expressed in this writing.

I hope you enjoy it.

I Cannot Save You

I can watch you on the water, struggling to breathe, reaching for the safety of the shore.
And I cannot save you.

I can reach for you and try to pull you in, but you must reach back and help me.

I can throw you a life preserver to keep you from sinking, but this will only work for awhile. You must still swim to shore and save yourself.

While I stand on the shore and watch you drowning, floundering, struggling to survivegasping for air and calling out my nameI know that I cannot jump in and save you. For you would only pull
me down into the water with youand neither of us would make it to the safety of the shore.

And yet, I struggle with that decisionfor surely, if you do not make it to safety, if the water overcomes you and I watch you go down one more timeand this time you do not riseI know that I would not want to live my life knowing that I could not save you, that there would be times I would wish I had gone down in that water with you, sacrificed myself, yet neither of us would be saved.

I can save myself. I can choose not to jump into that water.

But I cannot save you.

When you first jumped into the water, I watched you, and you splashed around laughing and floating on your back. I laughed with you, standing on the shore, splashing water in your face. But then you dove deeper and swam farther into

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