I know what I did to you was so wrong, but at the time it also felt so necessary to my survival. I don't know if those two things can both be true, but that's how it was.

She's still beautiful. Not in an obvious Vanessa LeGrande or Byrn Shraeder kind of way. In a quiet way that's always been devastating to me.

It's the same thing that happens when I turn off a really good movie - one that I've lost myself to - which is that I'll be thrown back to my own reality and something hollow will settle in my chest. Sometimes, I'll watch a movie all over again just to recapture that feeling of being inside something real. Which, I know, doesn't make any sense.

You meet people, you part ways, sometimes you cross paths again. Mostly, you don't.

And I kissed him back so hard, like I was trying to merge our bodies through our lips.

Then I smell the sweat on him, a clean musky scent that I'd bottle and wear as perfume if I could.

If I stay. If I live. It's up to me.