Now that all her things are gone, the apartment echoes, and I feel raw--as if the sounds of emptiness wore claws.
I do not regret the end, but rather, the hostility between us in the end. I never meant to be mean or cruel, but when you're in a trench, any weapon appeals to the mold of your hand.
We were together almost a year in what I've come to realize was a very dysfunctional relationship. I felt safe with her, because she revealed herself; opening wide to allow me access into any space I wished to tread. I felt safe, because I knew everything to expect and risked very little.
When we first met, she was ashamed to take me around her friends for fear of what they would think of her for dating a fat person. If I hadn't been too scared to hurt then, I would have not-so-politely excused myself from her life. If I had been able to open up to myself then, I would have opened up to her and poored her scalding words from my blistered self back onto her lips.
But I stayed, because it didn't matter to me then what she thought, because her thoughts of me glimmered in comparison to my steady desire to die.
The first time we met, she told me that she had never, not once, not for a second, wanted to die, and I remember being incredulous. I asked her over and over again if she were serious. If it were possible.
Maybe I stayed, at the beginning, because I wanted a life as light as hers--where the thought of dying wasn't even a passionate tirade.
Yet, that's why I left--I have lived through too much to travel light.