When I open the door of the bathroom, I come face-to-face with my husband. He looks like home, like second chances.

I shake the thoughts from my head, they're just remnants, something infused into my skin, a product of our surroundings.

He's taken me to our favorite bar in downtown St. Louis.

Dinner has been broken conversation, vague searchings. I don't know what he wants from this visit, from us.

Marriage was not a fix for what ailed us. For our demons.

When I said yes to Connor, our problems did not magically float away.

My depression did not dissipate. My anxiety did not exit the room. Some days everything was amplified.

Some days I was convinced love alone could save me when deep down I knew that was a dangerous lie. It was a violent sea, being with me.

My anger became amplified at times. When Connor suggested therapy again, I raged, I rebelled.

When I finally gave in, I half-assed it. I couldn’t give up my control. I wanted it in all things. I couldn’t get better for him.

I had to get better for me. And even then, I wasn’t ready. After two months of going just to please him, I found a strange thing happening. I looked forward to going. I quit. And then I left him.

We were married only eleven months.

Connor smiles at me and I walk back to our table. I enjoy the silence while he is gone, but a voice finds its way back to me. It's in my head, a drumming.

Someone like you. It’s so hard to be with someone like you.

It's a sentence I say over and over in my head. I practice it with different voices. The voices of different lovers who have left. Found me to be “too much".

I weigh and measure myself by standards that I do not place on others. Do I bring in enough money? Do I cook enough? Clean enough? Am I the perfect partner?

No. Definitely, not on paper, and I am in control of this paper.

It's a blurry line. Have I done this to myself or did society do this to me? Did Connor do this to me? Did his family do it to him? They gave him the perfect life, setting him up for failure, for this comparison syndrome.

When Connor returns, he stands at the table, he doesn't sit.

"What?" I ask, looking up at him. I don't like men standing over me. He knows this. There must be a strain in my eyes.

"Sorry," he says, realizing his error. He sits. "I think we should get out of here. It's too loud in here, I don't know why I thought we should talk here.”

"Okay," I say, reaching for my coat and standing. I don't care where we are for this, for whatever this is.

It was raining when we walked outside. We half ran, half walked to his car. He opened the door for me and I could hear my breathing, amplified, a chorus of fear inside.

We sat still inside, watching the rain, for five minutes, before he spoke.

"It took me a long time to find an answer to the one question you always asked: why do you love me? I never knew anyone as sad as you. I never knew someone so passionate about sticking up for people. Not just the people you knew but the people in the world. You weren't necessarily like that when I met you, but that's the woman you grew to be. Some nights during our short-lived marriage," he half laughs, we were still legally married, it wasn't over, "we would be lying in bed and you would talk for hours about the way you wanted to change the world. The way you wanted to make it fairer for everyone. My friends think you're naïve. That you don't see the world for what it is. I think they’re wrong. You see the world exactly for what it is and that's why it hurts you so much."

I begin to cry, competing, losing to the rain.

"That's why you were so sad all the time. You weren't just sad about the things that happened to you. You absorbed all the hurt that the world had."

I was shaking my head, agreeing, wishing it away, I didn't know.

"When I was younger, I cared about superficial shit," he says. "On paper, you were exactly what I wanted. You are still exactly what I want but it runs deeper than your beauty. It's who you are and who you are trying to be. What can change in a year? I don't know if you still write the way you did, try the way you did, but in my mind you do. When you would ask me years ago why I loved you, I could only give you one answer."

I thought of a night on our tan sheets, fresh from the drying.

"Why do you love me?" I asked, needing something, because I could feel myself falling again, into the black.

"It’s because you're real," he says those words next to me, the same words he said back then. "You were never fake. Sometimes I wished you would fake it. I wished you were better at small talk, better at socializing. But that's not you, and I spent too many years trying to put you in a box."

"You weren't as bad after we got married." My voice is small in the swelling space. His hand is on the center console, close to mine.

"Not as bad, but still doing it. It wasn't until you left that I realized all the things you hated about me were true. I was obsessed with money. But only because it meant giving you a better life than you had grown up with. I wanted to take care of you, provide for you. I wanted to have children with you and give you the children you never had."

"I stopped wanting that and you lied, you pretended you stopped wanting it, too."

"I know. My obsession with giving you the white picket fence life caused me to miss all the signs, the direct words, too. We both changed but we didn't change together. I don't know if there's anything more heartbreaking than knowing the things you want in life are no longer the same as the things the person you love wants."

I never thought I was the mothering type but he said he knew I would've been the best one. He still remembers the days in the beginning when I would smile at him and grab his hand and tell him I just wanted a little girl of my own. That was before the memories came back.

"You never gushed over babies and you never really knew how to talk to children. You talked to children like adults, but I never told you I thought that was the right way to do it. For some reason, you feel like you're doing it wrong. Everything. I've never known someone to write down their failures so intricately the way you did. Sometimes I hated the fact that you started writing."

"Trust me, I could tell. It's one reason I left."

"You were digging your own grave with it. Writing down every little flaw, dissecting it."

I cannot deny it. I like it that way. "I just picked up where you left off."

"I think you spent so many years confusing love and obsession, it was hard to separate the two."

"What was I obsessed with?" My writing, my pain. I already know the answer.

"It used to be me. Then, it wasn't."

"Your jealousy, it killed us. I learned to hate you." I did. The sound of his voice, the way he cleared his throat when he woke up in the morning. The way he whimpered in bed, at night, just wanting me to reach out to him.

"Hate and love run a lot closer to another than we want to admit. I spent a long time hating you, but I never worried that I wouldn't remember what it was like to love you. I didn't even know why I wanted you to come back here. I just wanted to look you in the eye. To tell you that you're not the only one in the world who's felt pain. That what you did to me may not be as bad as what you've been through. But it is significant. I am significant."

“I can’t sit in this car with you. I can’t sit here and hear this.” I am frantic, I roll down the window, the rain comes in, and I push my face into it. Connor reaches for me but I push him away. “Don’t touch me!” He recoils, I see his memory, his wound, open again. I screamed those words at him before. He was the one I gave my hate to. The one I punished for what my stepfather did to me.

He pulls away, reaches for the window controls on his left side. My window goes up and I stare forward, my face slick with tears and the sky’s weeping.

He starts the car and we leave the parking lot.