here

No. This isn't what I wanted.

I came here because I wanted you. I closed the distance, left everything I loved to be here. To be near you. You have always held my heart. Against every instinct for survival, it is yours still.

Last night I dreamed that I had the baby of another man and, looking down at the tiny body, I felt indifference. Not love. Not tenderness. Guilt that I couldn't offer this deserving creature the natural affection of a mother. But not even guilt could overcome the feeling of wrongness. It only intensified the sense that I'd taken a wrong turn - leading me further from you.

I can't do this. I never could pretend that I was meant to be someplace else, leading the comfortable life of another woman. No wonder this battle at work feels tiring -feels that it isn't really my battle. I already fought my own war and lost. And now, without the comfortable presence of Willem to mute the screaming inside my own brain, I look around me and consider that everything I am, everything that is true and real inside of me is entangled with you. Entangled with the people I love. And I'm alone here. I am playing make-believe to think I could create a life without you.

I was meant to be working in Africa. I was meant to be building military maritime capacity, and inventing drugs with my SSNMR patent. I was meant to be next to you, knowing what it is to hear you breathe and reach out and touch you. And this path is so far off that mark. When I can close my eyes, live my life in the present and forget there was ever a meaningful, joyful past, forget the pain that came from the severing of everything I cared about, I can dwell in this valley of lotus eaters. But I don't want an opiate to soothe the pain. I want to feel it. It is real. It is raw and terrible. It is me.