I survived. I breathed air. And that was all.

The truth is, you don't recognize failure until it is behind you. You can't smell the stink of horror until it is a dying memory. You don't know how bad it was until you get out of the hole.

The hole was my old apartment, the one I took as an effort to stop sleeping in the beds or other generosities of my friends. The apartment that was at once a monk-like retreat (with its sparsity, it's lack of things, it's need to have me generating action for there to be any action). I spent the last eight months there like a robotic husk of myself. I woke up. I went to work. I drank myself into a stupor. I collapsed into bed. Rinse, repeat, with the occasional variable. I spent as little time there as possible. I went through the motions of a life. Not my life. Just some life. I survived. I breathed air. And that was all.

The only true moments of clarity and inspiration I had in that apartment involved the cleanse, in which I had to force myself to find something to do with this newfound time on my hands--it turns out that when you don't eat or drink for three weeks you have an amazing amount of time to waste. Also, I could sometimes stimulate myself into doing yoga, if a friend was involved or if I felt particularly in need of yoga.

Oddly enough, what really made me aware of just how wrong my apartment was for me was the addition of the two kittens. They took up my space with great joy and I felt trapped in their path, in that tiny shoebox of an apartment, feeling like I was part of the obstacle course they formed where they catapulted (heh heh "cat"-apulted) themselves in an oblong circle like a race track, starting with the bathroom, they chased each other through the shower curtain and in the tub and out the other end and out the bathroom and past the kitchenette and over the chair and leapt onto the hamper and skidded across the window sill and dived into the bed, where I was laying and attempting some forgery of sleep, and then raced to the hall and back into the bathroom where it began all over again.

I had never imagined that there was something wrong with my place until I was under siege by two kittens and I realized there was no where for me to hide.

In my new apartment, I have a door to my room. I feel good about this. This makes me happy. Even though I can hear the other people who live in my apartment and are a part of me now, if my door is closed there is nothing they can do, nothing they can say, they cannot bother me and even if they knock I can say, hey, I'm busy. And I couldn't do that before, I couldn't lock the cats in the bathroom, because the doorknob was broken and they would probably just yelp at the door.

Also, there was the issue of confinement, that everything was in one space, that I was sleeping a mere five feet away from my refrigerator and it was a loud refrigerator that frequently hummed itself into my consciousness every night. I got so used to that noise that the last night I slept there with that thing unplugged (because it was empty and unnecessary) I couldn't sleep.

But what that apartment taught me is that no matter how bad it got, no matter how horrendous it looked, no matter how sad and pathetic it all seemed, I wasn't with him and that was all that mattered. I didn't go back to him, I didn't beg him to love me again, I didn't once wonder if it could ever be again.

Okay, I felt like a burn victim and every day was a measure of just how much I was getting back to "normal" and every single day I spent there was like a salve, a totally needed part of my life where I needed to feel that lack, that disparity, that hopelessness. I had to face the facts that maybe I wasn't a bad person despite what happened, because I had really put my entire self into that relationship, it was the first time I had actually given a fair amount of effort to being a good girlfriend. I had to realize that I didn't fail entirely, because he set up blockades at every opportunity and I swiftly swam past them all; he was a contrary worm. I had my faults. Maybe I was a little too fluid, a little too loose. Being the opposite of what I had been maybe seem a little fishy, a little suspect and maybe he was waiting for that horrid woman he had known to rear her ugly head and maybe it was not too hard for him to lure her to the light.

I needed time and space and air to breathe to get over that failure. It is no surprise to me that people I haven't seen in months have suddenly appeared in my scope. He forced me to be small. The failure forced me to be tiny. I hate that I had to pull myself inward and shrink. I have missed so much of my friends, but I feel like I am waking up from a thing I didn't know I had, that I thought moving out and being on my own had solved and I had no idea that it was not over. Today was the first day I could talk about it without being upset or crying or being mad at him. I fucked up. He fucked up. We fucked each other up. And now, we don't have to worry about that anymore. He wanted me to be happy, but he had no idea it involved him not being in my life anymore.

And now: I don't know his number, I don't know his stories, I don't know his world anymore and it is all because I set myself away into that apartment where I didn't have anything except myself.

And I learned there, in that place, that there is nothing I need except myself.