the black holes that surround you are heavier by far

It is too easy for me to forget my flaws, my mistakes. Nothing stays in my memory for long; each day passes, fresh and then fading quickly like a ripe peach going rotten, until all that's left is mush to show that once there was fruit.

But now I am living with my mistakes, and that's something I've never done. I have always run away. When I made the biggest mistake of my life 17 months ago, I couldn't wait to leave. And I have been trying to punish myself ever since, but I couldn't make it stick because deep down I was arrogantly sure that it wasn't my fault.

It was my fault, and I left my mess behind for other people to clean up. The least I could have done was stayed . . . the very least. And I ran away.

I can't run away now. I bought pretty things and watched movies and read books and I can still feel him breathing in the next room. I hear his laugh and I am not part of it. I don't make him happy. I can't undo the wrong and the pain I've caused by not being good enough. By not trying hard enough. I never tried because I was scared to, and even now I don't think I have it in me to do it, and I have run out of pretty words to make him stay and think that better things are coming.

I'd like to blame this on something deep and flawed within me, something that's not my fault, but the truth is that it's like someone forgot to tie a knot at the end of my knitting, and I have always been unravelling it purposefully. I could have changed, still could, but I don't think I ever will.

I lie, and I cheat, and I steal. For no good reason. I am not as smart as I pretend to be, and I am at least sixty pounds overweight because the simple truth is that I'm lazy.

It's a momentary impulse that makes me tell these things, and tomorrow I will have forgotten I ever did. But for tonight, I will let just the tiniest slip of truth out, and that is that the person I used to be in love with, the person I loved most in all the world, would rather sleep on the floor than in my arms. He would rather, I think, walk through a broken glass than be with me again, and I don't blame him.

I have driven him away with fits of bad temper and the mercurial vagaries of my kindness. I moved across the country for love and lost it by being erratic, irrational, and immature.

In short, I was myself.