I had a long talk with Dr. B. as well as my husband yesterday.

I told them both what I had been doing "wrong".

My husband, the more understanding of the two, didn't feel I did anything wrong by talking to M. Still, to keep it a secret is to keep my husband out of my life. I can't do that at this point. I need him to know I can always be honest and faithful to him. I am still so weak. I am still so destructive. And, I can't talk to M. without thinking of so many things. There's no love there. None. I don't crave him the way I used to a long time ago. What I think I do crave, is the danger aspect of being with someone that is so wrong for me.

As Dr. B. put it, I like to play with dynamite just to see what happens.

I told Dr. B. about the emails in full. He asked if anything could be construed as "suggestive". I told him that I didn't really think so, but with M. and I, it's all suggestive. Even a hello is suggestive.

I believe that. It's part of the sickness. M. and I suffer from tortured artist syndrome. We struggle in our own skin. We had that in common. Around each other, we could be real. Us. I could accept his flaws because they so closely mirrored my own. We took comfort in one another. No one understood us, not our respective significant others, no one. We wrote poetry side by side. We would lay around naked in every way in his little apartment in CT, just watching the snow. We shirked our responsibilities in favor of pretending the world just disappeared. We were the only ones left. He was broke, always struggling. I was emotionally drained, needing a refill. I needed a tortured soul at my side. I found it in M.

Our sexual habits were bizarre at best, and I think that is always what I missed the most. I could do anything with him. ANYTHING. It was always acceptable, always fine. There was no shame. There was no questioning. I catered to his every whim, and he to mine. It was violent, furious and passionate. It was mindless, reckless and irresponsible.

In other words...it was perfect.

Not perfect for now, but perfect for back then when being a wife and mother couldn't possibly fulfill my life. My husband (ex) was vacant. He didn't want me. At least, not sexually. He just wanted me there, more like a live in babysitter. I felt soulless. I performed like a stepford wife, even then. Wonder woman. I took care of our kids, made dinners, laughed at all his jokes (when company was present) and worked fulltime, constantly in a manic mode.

You can only function at that level for so long.

This is where M. fit in. When I was with him, there was nothing to do. Nothing. We lazed around all day. We ate, slept, watched TV...naked. It had nothing to do with sex, but more about the freedom. Both of our significant others wouldn't understand what it was like just to lay still, nothing to do but breathe. They were both perpetually criticizing us. He was a lazy bastard who never held a job. I was a wife who was too demanding and paid more attention to the kids than I did to him. (Um, hello? What precisely is wrong with that?) By ourselves, M. and I, it was ordinary. Quiet. Hushed. Secretive. Candles and music. Take out food. Laying on the floor, sans clothing, just watching the moon breaking into that tiny alcove apartment. When we did venture out, we walked everywhere. Long treks through the snow. I found it so relaxing, so exquisite compared to my Florida lifestyle.

A year later, we imploded. There is only so much sex, inadvertantly mistaken for love that a person can take at such a high volume. There were other reasons it ended, personal reasons. Reasons I will never divulge because they don't matter any longer.

I started to date my present husband just as M. and I were ending everything. I was ending my former marriage as well. Three men on the burner, along with a vast selection of suitors from school, the internet, back home in NY that promised me a heightened experience no matter where I went.

Never was I on a higher ego trip than I was back then. I felt like a master of puppets, so to speak.

My present husband broke me of all that.

When we first started to date, he wasn't nearly as proficient in lovemaking as M. was. He didn't have as much experience. But, what experience he lacked at the time, he made up for in enthusiasm. The first night we ever went out, he fucked me with such an intensity. Not the heightened frenzy I was used to, more like someone who was really trying to please me and would not stop until I admitted defeat.

Wasn't going to happen, baby. Not with me. I was too oversexed to be impressed, but noted his willingness to plow forward feverently. That part, I liked.

As time progressed, I saw M. once. I continued seeing my husband because I genuinely loved his company. He was responsible, without being tedious like my ex husband. He was fun without being over the top, like M. And, he was warm. So warm. He felt safe. I felt like I was home when I was with him...not the home I was used to, but the home every woman should crave, if she wasn't bipolar.

I fell in love. He didn't. At least, he said he didn't.

That only made me want him more.

Are you serious, I thought. YOU don't want ME? Oh no no no, son. That is so not how it goes. You see, I fuck you, you get addicted to me, you can't let me go and in the end, I blow you off. Do you not get the rules of engagement here? That's the way it is. YOU pursue ME. YOU crave ME. Not the other way around. It's never been that way, don't you get it?

He didn't care about my rules. He wanted my presence when he wanted it. He made love to me when he wanted to be with me. He took me out when he felt like it. He called when he wanted to.

I was lost.

"But I love you," I would say.

"I can never love you, C.," he would say to me. "I don't believe in forever or marriage. It's not me."

"You love me," I would whisper as tears streamed onto my lips.

"I'm sorry. I don't."

These words haunted me forever. And, years later, when he finally did say he loved me...it would be those same words, "I don't love you anymore" that would bring me to my knees again. The pain that shot through me. The howling cry I let out, like a wounded animal. I grabbed him as we fought on the side of the road.

"Don't ever fucking say that to me again," I'd scream. "YOU LOVE ME. YOU DO."

"I don't. Not anymore."

And I melted. Like the Wicked Witch getting water thrown on her, my soul collapsed, melted into a pool of smoke and ash. I died right then and there. He drove away. I cried on the side of the road. I cried and cried until every ounce of water within me was drained.

I went home, defeated.

More years of torturing one another passed. I was obsessed with a man who said he loved me to my face and then, told his family he was not in love with me behind my back. I choked him, strangled his need for freedom by constantly making my presence known in his world, even when he didn't want it. The sex back then was frenzied and emotional, the way it had been with M., only this man wouldn't commit to me. All the times I had men succumb to my whim by using the divinity that was my sexual prowess, I couldn't break this one. One night, I made him handcuff me, nude, to our bed. He blindfolded me. He teased me and then, left the room. 15 minutes later, I realized I was panicking. Had he left? Had he decided I was too over the top, too demanding of him? My heartbeat went wild. My head was spinning. I was laying there, vulnerable and exposed in so many ways. And when I couldn't take it any longer, when I was finally at the point where I was ready to scream out his name...he came back into the room, planted his face between my legs and let me know, subtlely, that he hadn't left...but he would be damned if he was going to play the game my way.

My boyfriend became my heroin. In the years that followed, he would hurt me so many times. Not physically like I was used to, but emotionally. Broke my spirit. Broke my pride. Even toyed with my extremely healthy self esteem. He wouldn't be dictated to. Wouldn't be told who he could be with and when he could be with them. He remained faithful to me, because it wasn't his nature to stray...but he also wouldn't be ordered to. He told me he looks at other women all the time, and tough shit if I didn't like it. He had me tearing my hair out of my skull at one point...and at another, I took a handful of pills. I couldn't take this. I wanted to die, because I wasn't getting my way.

Crazy, isn't it?

In 2002, he married me in the courthouse of our town. We wore jeans and sneakers. I carried a single red rose. I was now compliant. A good girl. Obedient. In some ways, he was the new master of manipulation. His control was more covert, more stealth than my own. We kept our marriage a secret. He didn't want anyone to know. In my heart, I felt it was because he was ashamed of me. That was again, the sickness speaking. In earnest, my husband was a coward who could not tell his family and friends that he was genuinely in love with me. He was embarassed after telling everyone he was not.

In March of 2003, our wedding day was planned, the big wedding to do with dresses, flowers, tuxes...the works. We had a fight the day before. By that night, he was gone. He left me alone with 250 guests to call and tell them our wedding was canceled. He took off. Never called me. Never came home. The feeling of abandonment washed over me. It strangled me. I had never felt this way since the day my biological father decided that he preferred his secretary over me and my mom. I spent the next few days in a xanax induced haze. I wanted to die. I begged for it, because I wasn't strong enough to do it by myself. I hated myself so much at that point that I sentenced myself to LIFE. Life was harder. I was going to force myself to live it because there was no greater torture than that.

When he came home, finally, we drove to Miami Beach. We talked. We fought. We screamed at each other. We cried a lot. Well, I cried a lot. He sat in his stunning silence. He was always a master at that stone cold silence that used to drive me insane. We fucked, a lot. I tried to remind him of the reasons I was the perfect woman for him. No one could do him the way I could, I reminded him. And he agreed. No one had before, no one will in the future...but we still weren't going to stay together.

Our home consisted of a lot of silence and tears. This went on for months. We were already married. We tried so hard to figure a way out of this predicament we were in, the bed we made for one another and were now forced to lie in. He was lying to me so much, I had no concept of the truth anymore. We tried and failed miserably at marriage counseling.

And, it was around that time that I reached out for M. again.

I began writing him. One email at a time. He missed me, he told me. He missed making love to me. Missed seeing me sleep next to him. Missed the sound of my voice saying his name. Missed my smile. Missed my poetry.

"Come back," he said.

"I will," I promised. I wanted to. I wanted to be with the only person that accepted my disease, my self inflicted wounds. The man who caressed my scars and thought they were all beautiful. I needed that back. I told him I would be back, be patient. Wait for me. He said he would, and I believed him.

Months passed. I never went back to him. The emails slowed and eventually stopped. I was indifferent at this point. I didn't care anymore. I wandered aimlessly from job to job to job, never staying anywhere very long. I felt like a stray dog, running around, looking for a piece of food to sustain her for at least one night. Maybe even a temporary home, a place to be warm for the night.

We were moving into a new home, taking our ugly baggage with his. I couldn't live in our old apartment any longer, with all the pain and suffering I could remember embedded in every single wall. I felt like the windows were entry ways into my pain. The open door was laughing at me. The carpet felt like sandpaper on my feet. I suffocated there. I needed out. And, my husband, who I barely had any connection to any longer, took me out. He was riddled with guilt for what he had done to me, but I didn't care. I was in pain. I was sucked dry. I had nothing left to give anyone. Nothing to offer.

Our dog ran away. He chased after him. He fell, breaking his leg, his femur to be precise. Needed emergency surgery. A routine surgery to fix his leg. I slept by his side. One night, I felt his fever. His lungs were making crackling noises that I remembered from nursing school. The sound of death. Crackles. He had developed several blood clots in his lungs. I ran out to the charge nurse. "Something is wrong with my husband," I yelled. His fever was 106. He was on fire. He couldn't breathe. He nearly died. Down to ICU he went with a very poor prognosis. I wasn't listening to the doctors or nurses. I was in a daze. A nurse asked me if I wanted a Rabbi to come in, just in case.

"In case of what," I asked her.

"In case he um, you um...you know, like when a priest comes in to give last rights," she said hesitantly.

I flipped the fuck out.

"WHAT??? Are you saying my husband is going to DIE???"?

"Let me get the doctor for you," she stammered before walking out.

And in that moment, I reconnected with my husband. I took his hand, fingers entwined so that our wedding bands were side by side. I kissed his forehead. I stroked his head. He was on a respirator.

"You have to fight," I whispered in his ear. "I can't be without you."

And I cried.

Five days later, my husband moved from ICU to the step down cardiac unit. And while he was still having complications due to respiratory malfunction and bleeding issues from the blood thinners he was forced to take due to the clots, he was alive. I fed him. I bathed him. I combed his hair. I stayed with him every single moment.

When I finally brought him home, he sat me down.

"I did the right thing, marrying you," he said, just before falling asleep on the couch, drained from the pain killers.

From that moment, we began again. It was like a new day. Clean, fresh, untouched by anything. The sun, scarcely risen. Quiet, unscathed by car horns, jackhammers, people congesting the street. Not even a dog barking. All the fucking in various and sundry positions in the world, all the tricks I could have pulled in the world would not have brought us to this point. He knew he could rely on me. His family never came to be with him, but I was there. I never left. And now, I knew I never would again. The grand revelation? I knew he would never leave now either. No need for a marriage counselor any longer. We did it on our own, one sweet day at a time. We worked on it, not a day we neglected our vows to one another. The pain of the past eventually disapated. We were whole again. On a level playing field where past transgressions would be forgiven and replaced by love, kisses, hand holding and gentle moments.

What does this all have to do with M. and my recent emails with him?

Everything. Because I realize now I don't miss him. I may miss my carefree life, but not him, specifically. What I miss, truth be told, is the abuse. Whether it was M. causing me heartache, Tony's brutality of my body, my ex husbands vacancy and indifference or the earlier life I had with my present husband...I missed being scarred. I missed being cut. This man that I married, he refuses to hurt me any more, ever again.

Part of my sickness is missing the abuse. I recognize that now.

When I confessed the letters to my husband, he took it in stride, knowing his place in my world. I told him, please, don't let me do it anymore. He said, it wasn't a big deal. I told him what Dr. B. said...that it was like playing with something combustible, like dynamite...no different than when I ran my car across traffic with my eyes closed, just to see if I would die.

And I cried, but this time with the kind of relief and release that comes when you finally find someone who "gets" you. After years of doubting it, I realize my husband gets it. He understands. He treats my bipolar no differently than if I were diagnosed with cancer. He knows it is an illness like any other. And he nurses me through it with the same tenderness, grace and understanding that I showed him when he nearly died in my arms so many years ago.

We made love last night. It started tender and sweet, the way it usually did. It ended with a wild, passionate and insanely intense experience that both he and I completely appreciated. The best of both worlds. All that, and love too. It was perfect.

It was life as it should be. Ordinary, with a splash of hurricane winds now and then.

I can live with that. Forever.