The Window

If only escaping were as easy as sneaking out the open window with the world then at your feet.

But it's never that easy. People on the outside simplify it, saying, "You should just leave. Pack up your bags and leave the bastard."

But I can't. I would if I could, but I just can't. For so many reasons.

When love is fresh and new, you feel like there is no end to the possibilities. Anything is within reach as long as the two of you are together. No one talks about the prison it becomes when the love disappears. And that's exactly what it is - a prison. But it's worse. There are doors that open and close; windows that bring in the scent and sights of a beautiful world. But they offer nothing except a taunt of what was and is not mine anymore.  It’s not my world anymore. The window is a facade.

Love gives so much, but takes much more. No one warned me that giving up my heart meant surrendering my soul and my future. I am just a slave to the love that once existed.  My freedom, the price for empty promises.

"Leave," my internet friends say. Leave and go where? They are the only friends I'm allowed to have, and that's just because he doesn't know. At first I thought it was sweet, how he wanted to be only with me all the time. It didn't feel like isolation then; I craved the attention. Only now do I know it was one more brick into my world of confinement he was building.

Go to a shelter? What a farce. Maybe for some women, but not for me. I think from the beginning he knew I had that sense of pride. Maybe that was what made me attractive to him.  Call it stubbornness, embarrassment, an inability to admit failure -- maybe it's juvenile but it's who I am. To tell the world I destroyed my own life by loving a man so completely that I surrendered all and blinded myself to the monster he would become, would be the end of me.

I’m not a martyr. It takes all I have to face each day knowing I failed myself. But admitting it to the world, asking strangers to help pull me together again, would be to make it all too real. Maybe that doesn't make sense; maybe it's what I tell myself so I don't have to face the obstacles I know would be ahead of me.

For now I will close the window as he has closed his heart to loving me. My escape does not exist on beaches or far away places. It is within me. A place I must find. My own window to open.