All of us are to blame for what happened—all of us serving our sentences. We were careless and reckless, thinking our youth made us indestructible, exempt from our sins, and it cost us.
Snow drifts toward my windshield in a lazy fall, dusting the trees and covering the surrounding ground as I exit the highway. The crunch of my tires in the gravel has my heart pounding in my throat as my hands start to shake. I sweep the endless evergreens lining the road while trying to convince myself that facing my past head-on is the first step in confronting what’s plagued me for years. All I have left is dwelling within the prison I’ve built. It’s the truth I’m determined to face that’s the most definite, the most crippling.
Most consider knowing all-consuming love a blessing, but I consider it a curse. A curse I’ll never be able to lift. I’ll never know love again as I did here all those years ago. And I don’t want to. I can’t. I’m still sick with it.
There is no question in my mind that for me, it was love.
What other pull could be so strong? What other feeling could addict me to the point of insanity? Of doing the things I did and living with these memories within this ghost story.
Even when I’d sensed the danger, I gave in.
I didn’t heed a single warning. I went in a willing captive. I let love rule and ruin me. I played my part, eyes wide open, tempting fate until it delivered.
There was never going to be an escape.
Stopped at the first light at the edge of town, I press my head against the steering wheel and inhale calming breaths, hating the fact that I’m still so powerless to the emotions this trip has stirred within me, even as the woman I’ve become.
Exhaling, I glance back at the bag that I tossed in the backseat after my decision mere hours ago. I thumb my engagement ring, rotating it on my finger as another stab of guilt runs through me. All hope of the future I spent years building was lost the minute I ended my relationship. He’d refused to take the ring, and I have yet to take it off. It hangs heavy, a lie on my finger. The time I spent here before has caused another casualty, one of many.
I was engaged to a man capable of keeping his vows, a man worthy of commitment, of unconditional love—a loyal man with a steadfast heart and warm spirit. And to him, I’d never been fair. I could never love him in the way a wife should love a husband.
He was a consolation, and accepting his proposal meant settling. One look at his face when I called off our upcoming nuptials let me know I had destroyed him with the truth.
The truth that I belong to another. That whatever remains of my heart, body, and soul belongs to a man who wants nothing to do with me.
It was the agony on my fiancé’s face that aided to my breaking point. He’d given me his love, his devotion, and I’d thrown it away. I’d done to him what was done to me. Disobeying my heart, my master and monster had cost me Collin.
Minutes after I liberated us both, I packed a bag and left in search of more punishment. I drove straight through the night, knowing there was no significance of time, that it doesn’t matter. Nobody is waiting for me.
Well over six years have passed, and I’m back to square one, back to the life I fled, my feelings running rampant as I reason with myself that leaving Collin wasn’t a mistake, but a necessary evil to free him from the lies I told. I’d wronged him making promises I could never keep, and there was no way I was making more, to love and cherish in both sickness and in health because I hadn’t disclosed just how sick I am.
I never told him how I allowed myself to be used, ravaged, and at times debased to the point of depravity…and that I’d loved every second of it. I never told my fiancé how I’d bloodlet my heart—starved it—until it had no choice but to beat in a distinct rhythm that only matched the thrum of one other. In doing so, I’d sabotaged my chances of recognizing and accepting the kind of love that heals, rather than hurts. The only love I’ve ever known or craved is the kind that keeps me sick, sick with longing, sick with lust, sick with need, sick with grief. The distorted kind that leaves scars and jaded hearts.
If I can’t grieve enough to cure myself in my time here, I’ll remain sick. That will be my curse.
There may never be a happily ever after for me because I gave my chance away by becoming attuned to the dark parts. Accustomed because of the year I freed my inhibitions, reacting to rejection and pain and losing all moral sense of myself.
These are things you don’t say aloud. These are the type of confessions women who command respect are never supposed to give voice to. Not ever.