Dear Reader

I think about it sometimes. I imagine it in detail. I can almost feel my hands curling into fists. Alcoholics call it falling off the wagon. Not sure what to call this. It is more like breaking a habit. But even that just sounds like a name of a Linkin Park song. I imagine what it would be like to just let it happen. To let the anger, the guilt, the frustration, the sadness, the hurt overwhelm me and feel me up so much I need to scream. Scream and hit and throw things and maybe kick too. But the imagining doesn't stop there. I can imagine what the consequences would be. What would happen next. At first there would be nothing. No pain except the dull ache where my punches connected with something. It's numbness. Numbness and fatigue. Then the shame starts. The shame for what I have done. For how it felt to do it. Even for feeling so helpless that I didn't feel I had any other options. That is when the tears start. The sobbing and the agony in the pit of my stomach. Gut wrenching. Heart breaking. Only the pillow muffles it. Then sleep enters and I drift off with the salt still on my face. I wake the next morning to look for bruises and wonder for days which ones are natural and which ones were me.

Sometimes when I imagining, "falling off the wagon" I wonder who will find me. What lucky person will stumble on me laying on the floor, in the tub, on my bed, on the couch, broken, bruised and tear stained. I imagine it would feel good to let myself fall and to let someone find me. It would feel almost like revenge. "See? Here is what you make me do! This is how you make me feel." It is at times like that that I understand how people can cut their wrists, attempt suicide, when they know someone will find them and send them to the hospital long before they bleed out.

These feelings are selfish. They are greedy. And I push them back with the look of horror on his face. The questions of "Why? Why did you do this Dani? What made you feel like you had to?" It's those questions that stop me every time I raise my fist and every time it starts to feel like too much.

In the three years I have been with him I have only not stopped myself twice. Once in April. We had been dating for 4 months. And once last spring. I am at the point in my life now where it is easier to not. It was almost hard to return to it that spring. I know that whether he remains in my life or not it will soon be too hard.