Decline: From Latin "declinare", to turn aside.

For a good while, there was nothing to tell. Still restlessly riding in the passengers seat, watching someone else's life in motion. I watched my body move satellite from my conscious being. The quiet seemed to emanate from the closing doors of your greyhound bus.

What had started as a drinking problem transitioned into extensive, exhaustive alcoholism. The nature of our relationship changed completely. In what felt like an instant, I didn't know you. Wild mood swings and black-out nights left you confused in the mornings. I would be the receiver of countless messages and phone calls that you would never remember; and the things you said, I would never forget. I felt gravity wane as I bloodied my fingers trying frantically to grab hold of the pavement, of our foundation, of what I wanted but couldn't take. You visited again, but this time things were different. There was a distance between us. Instead of trying to remember, I was looking for someone I could forget. As you walked out the door, I took a long, hard look at the person exiting my apartment. I knew it would be a long time before I saw you again. I knew we would not be the same.

My health began to spiral. Was it excess? Was I the cat that got the cream? I was as fat as royalty. I had never been a small girl and this has become something of a defining and defeating element of who I was then and, despite enormous weight loss, who I am now. For whatever reason, I had a difficult time blaming your regression on the absence of your good-natured being. I turned the blame, like a gun, toward myself. Unlovable, undesirable; I couldn't exude the charms I contained. I couldn't make you want good for yourself. I couldn't be the one to make you right. I was a damaged package, and my allegiance was deniable. I began to look at myself not as a human, but as some kind of monster. I regressed to a state of hyper-egocentrism, believing that everyone I came in contact with saw me as this derivation of what should be human; a mutation of "woman". I took your emotional and psychological blows with little resistance from then on. Submissive, I began abusing laxatives, purging and starving myself. You became the center of my universe, and my only motivation.

I spent the next two years painfully in love with a ghost I couldn't shake.