I know I’m doing it. I know I am self-sabotaging, but I can’t stop. Today, this week, this moment, I feel suffocated. I started drinking again. Blacking out. I forget Connor when I'm out. I force myself to forget him. Too many Christmases have gone by with no proposal. Too many Valentine's Days. I don't want to start my forever with him on a cliché day, but I would take it. I would take it on any day, just as long as he was asking me. We've been together for four years. I'm thirty-one and this is not where I expected us to be. I turn to the bottle and the page more than the man I love, the man who supposedly loves me.

I look back at our story and I cry. I have had to force him into everything. Into a relationship. Into living together. I can't force him to go buy a ring, and I don't want to be that girl. I’ve finally had enough. And as usual, instead of telling him I've had enough, I retreat. Into myself, into the page. Into the black.

The messages filled my inbox almost instantly. Girls who had been through what I had been through. Shared pain. Matching scars. Girls who hadn't named their abuser. Who hadn't uttered a word. They were all there, bundled together, holding hands through my computer screen, reaching for me.

I cringed at the thought of my family finding my writing, learning the truth that way. I needed to come clean, but I was not ready.

The only person who knew in my real life had distanced himself so far from me, I barely recognized him.

One person who reached out stood out to me amongst all the faces.

He was beautiful, completely not my type. His hair was long, grazing his shoulders, and he was blonde. My mother always hated blondes. I inherited her distaste. But this man, he was different. I found myself drawn to him. To his Instagram account. He was a writer as well. He wrote about a pain I knew. The bitter pain of not wanting to be alive some days. His style, the stop and start of his stanzas, it reeled me in. I was just as fascinated by his words as I was by his lips, his eyes. I couldn't tell the color in his black and white photo. But I wanted to know it, to know him.

I found myself dreaming about him, wondering what his voice sounded like. I convinced myself it was harmless, but I knew better.

I told myself it was sort of like developing a crush on a celebrity you saw on a screen. I ignored the message from him in my inbox for two weeks. Then I caved.

We talked about little things. Where we lived. Our favorite writers. Our shared admiration for each other's style. He was younger than me, and that made me pause, made me think our conversations were dangerous.

I find something so beautiful, nonthreatening about a younger man. As if a man younger than me hadn't grown into his killing tools. As if my years on him served as an armor. I felt the thing I needed most, felt it in my bones, my sighs and slow stretch of my teeth grazing my lip when I stared at his photo. Control.

I didn’t have it. I knew it wasn't true. I knew deep down, that a younger man could hurt me just the way men my age could.

But I liked to lie to myself. I liked to pretend this was a game I could come out on top of.

When he asked for my number, I gave it to him. He wanted to talk about writing. Wanted to write some poetry together. My friends, single friends, told me about the immature boys sending them dick pics. God, if a guy really wanted to get a girl going, he would send her some poetry into her inbox, that would do the trick.

When Logan sent me his words, I withered, then bloomed.

It is a slow death and birth, those moments lasted minutes, hours, days.

I came alive in ways I never thought possible.

We never texted late at night. He told me about a concert he was going to and I told him about my job. I was so careful not to cross a line that I knew I was crossing. A line I crossed by just thinking about going over the edge, falling into something I could not recover from.

Connor volunteered for more work trips. I spent my birthday alone and I got no flowers, no gift. Just a promise for a dinner date when he was back in town.

I hoped he would forget, and checked the bathroom mirror for more wrinkles.

Logan asked me my age and I didn't lie to him. He asked if he could call me so I ignored him for two weeks.

A brutal imbalance threatened my body. I stopped eating, developed a rash on my neck, my stress and broken heart too overwhelming. I stopped sleeping and wrote more in a month than I had in the past ten years. Everything was painted in my loneliness and my remorse. My longing for Logan and my resentment for Connor. I reached for him under the covers when he was home and he was always asleep, or pretending to be asleep. The shower was the only place I knew to go to. My tears mingled with the shower stream. I told Kate about my new friend and she asked to see what he looked like.

When she saw, she knew my secret. She knew my lie.