I can trace back every anxiety and the majority of bad feelings in the last eight years to one source. Every time I drank too much, dissociated, or quit, I had one thing burrowed in my mind. Everything I was most scared of has happened. In every instance where the choice was binary, me or the other, the other was chosen. Everything I have explicitly asked for was consistently denied. This is true as recently as last night.
The consolation is that there is nothing left to fear. There is not much else to try. There is nothing left to lose.
And for all this, I am never spent. I wake up every morning still breathing, my heart still beating. The embers of forsaken ambition not related to you still smolder in my damp mornings. There is something else, and perhaps there always was.
A weird version of solipsism, at least in the universe of us. I am the only thing I can be sure exists.