2 prompts from Joni B Cole

I want to tell you how it felt. It felt like the time Brian told me, with his eyes wide, about Matt's bachelor party. "And Zoot fucked this girl so hard with the vibrator, that she fell off the table!" There was no mistaking the glee in his voice. I didn't answer him then but the next day I crouched on our concrete stoop and drank my coffee alone.

It felt like the time Brian pressed his thick forearm across my throat. He was drunk and his eyes rolled like sluggish cue balls in their sockets. The police came. I went away with the kids to a bright hotel room. The next day he came to my office and took me to lunch in a dark bar. He tried to make light of what happened. "I didn't mean it," he said. I couldn't answer him or look at his smile. Instead I imagined tenderly pressing a razor through the thin white skin of my forearm and into the long blue stripe of my vein. I thought about how cold my body might feel as my blood drained away.

I want to tell you about my walls that are high and deep and fortified and how sometimes I fail to pay attention. Sometimes things slither in through fissures and this unravels me. Ropes of hair, strips of skin, skeins of tendons and ligaments and finally loops of intestines puddle into a slick pile.

Here's what I want to say to myself. This is what you must, but never can, believe: that you deserve better. That what Kelly said is true, you can't know if a choice is the wrong one until after you've made it. And while you may pray on your knees for hindsight-blindness, it will never happen. So don't let your mistakes define you. You're more than this.