It takes almost nothing at all. A stray thought in the shower, and suddenly I'm right back then and there and he's in front of me somehow and I'm yelling in my head at him, "DEATH WOULD HAVE BEEN KINDER" and suddenly I realize my mouth is actually moving and I've been saying that out loud too. I don't even know how loud. I can't remember if I said the rest out loud - "couldn't you have killed me instead?" I might have. I don't know. I don't think anybody else is home and I don't know if that's good or bad now.

I'm okay. I'm not okay. I have never been okay and I won't be okay until this is all over and completed somehow with some resolution I can't even imagine, and I've also been okay the entire time because I'm stronger than what he can do to me.

I'm crying and that's okay, and I'm practicing mindfulness like I'm supposed to because _this too shall pass_ and February is almost over and we're moving closer to the time of the year I can start to hope again. And I've made it almost to another Spring, it's close enough that I can believe it'll come, see it coming.

Four years ago I found it utterly impossible to believe I'd still be alive in six weeks, much less six months. I felt like I'd already made my exit in all but deed, and was just waiting out the clock until I couldn't resist it anymore. It felt inevitable.

There are things I can't even remember about that first year afterward... conversations, confessions, important times with people, where it's all just _gone_. I can't remember anything about important things. Sometimes a general shape of the way events went... But I do remember deliberately building in steps to prevent myself from leaving on my own terms, barriers to keep myself from ever getting to that point. They're all still in place.

Am I just talking myself through by reminding myself that the worst already happened and the worst part of the worst is something I've already survived?

I don't know. I'm still here. I'm still working on connecting myself to people and things and building reasons to still be here, so that if I'm ever that low again I will still have ties that bind me that I am unable to slip through.

But it takes so little sometimes for me to flash back to feeling so awful, so wretched, that it seems like it would have been better to have simply died the moment before I realized the depths of his betrayal.

It passes. I'm already moving out of feeling that way and into better territory. But I am so tired of this. I am so tired of having to fight, and so tired of having to build my life around surviving him.