My mood has been pretty stable this week.

Maybe a touch manic. Not to the extreme though...one of those cliff type areas where I dont know if I am going to just stand on the edge, or dive off. Free faling is more my style.

I confess to feeling like total garbage. This medicine is suffocating me. I can tell that I am slipping away, just like he said I would. M. and I haven't spoke since that last encounter. I check my email repeatedly, hoping for a goodbye, but in his usual fashion, he just disappears. I suppose that is a good thing. I wanted that to stop.

But I didn't. He was my last hope for holding onto something normal. At least, normal for me. My life is slowly being replaced with "good wife" syndrome.

And I feel strangled.

I know my husband reads this blog, but I swore I would never contain what I say on here to appease him. This blog is for me. He says he just reads it to gage my moods. I wish he would learn to read me, rather than my words. After 8 years together, I don't think I should have to spell out who I am to him. There are always subtle clues that surround my mania or my depression.

I may move this blog to a place where I know I can write without thinking about him all the time.

My head is humming all the time, from the Lamictal. A true, loud buzzing. It disrupts my thoughts. I can literally hear my head moving. I feel left of center, completely off kilter. I've been unsteady on my feet. My eyes are blurry all the time, my hearing is affected. I feel dizzy, constantly. If I were to imagine what vertigo felt like, this would be it.

And yet, my mood is stable. Is it worth the trade off? I don't know. I just don't know.

Tomorrow I got to see the psychiatrist. He is going to want to move me up in dosage. I think I am going to have to deny that request. I have my nursing boards next week and I cannot afford to feel more isolated and in a box than I already do.

Tiger in a cage. Walking back and forth. Stalking. Waiting for that one second when someone doesn't close her cage tight enough. Pacing. Biding her time.

Just biding her time.

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Half hour later edit:

I got in touch with Cassie, the niece of Tony. Tony. The man who beat me so badly that I can still feel every single bruise he inflicted on my body. Tony. No. No more covering it up with monikers. Anthony. Anthony G. I still have the burns from the cigarettes. The break in my hands, my ribs, my face and of course, my heart. The damage he really did was to my mind. It is January of 2007. It is 16 years since he took a baseball bat to my skull, opening my mind both physically and emotionally. Sixteen years since that day, November 3rd, outside 20 Barteau Lane in Blue Point, New York. Sixteen years since I was left for dead, face down in the gravel. Sixteen years since his brother picked me up and yelled, "Jesus fucking Christ, Anth! You killed her!"

The brother who lifted me from the pavement was Paul. Cassie's father.

I found Cassie on MySpace. It was a fluke. I had read that her older brother, Paulie, had died of serious heart complications. I loved that child. He was about 7 years old when Anthony and I split up. I was sitting in the office of my job, reading a magazine. I was flipping through the pages, when I came across Paulie's face. Yes, it was on the body of a young man, but that face. It leapt out at me. He looked exactly like his uncle Anthony. I read the article. I saw his parents names. I read the story further, finding out it was the same little boy who used to hold my face in his hands, call me Aunt C. and give me the best pursed lippped kisses I had ever known. When I read of his heart condition, I had this overwhelming urge to find him. And I did. A search of his name lead me to a MySpace site of a girl named Jackie. This girl was Paulie's girlfriend. I was so thrilled to find her. I read her entire MySpace account. I devoured the pics of Paulie. God, he looked so much like Anthony it was frightening. I was so excited to get in touch with him. Ask him if he remembered his Aunt C. Show him pictures from when he was a little boy.

And somewhere along the way, I read that he had died Christmas day, 2005.

I was devastated.

He wasn't supposed to die! Why did he die? Why wasn't it Anthony who died...someone who deserved to? I laid my head down on my desk and just cried and cried. I was so sickened by this. I wrote to Jackie, offering my condolences. I told her who I was to him. I offered her his baby pictures.

She never wrote me back. I respected her right to grieve and left her alone.

Sometime later, I went back to her page and saw Cassie's name on it. Cassie was only a baby when Anthony and I split up. She wouldn't remember me. I wrote her. Days passed. No answer. I figured she didn't want to hear from someone who was engaged to her Uncle so long ago. She was just a baby and now, she was this beautiful teenage girl. I decided to leave her alone. What was I doing? Why was I trying to reopen this wound?

I suppose it was for the same reason that lead me to knock on the door at Barteau Lane back in December of last year. I need to talk to Anthony. I need to ask him why he did those things to me. I need to hear him apologize for stealing so much of my life away from me. I needed to ask him why.

My husband said to me, you know...he may never apologize. He may not even know why he did those things himself. Will you get your closure then? Maybe he won't have any regrets about it at all.

I never thought of it that way.

Two days later, Cassie wrote me. She didn't remember me, but she knew that her Uncle talked about me all the time. Even as recently as this past Christmas. She said, "I am glad you arent' with him anymore. He is a piece of shit. You seem like you are a really nice lady."

Out of the mouths of babes.

We've been corresponding. Talking about her brother. Talking about her parents. Anthony hasn't been brought up by either of us since that first conversation, but I am dying for her to talk to me about him. I want to know that he is suffering the way I am. I want to know that he is so mournful of what he lost with me.

When I was engaged to my ex husband, I cheated on him...with Anthony. It started out as rape. He broke into my home and tied me up and raped me on the kitchen floor of the apartment I shared with my new fiancee. I filled out a police report. I dropped the charges. I called him. I told him I wanted to see him. No ropes this time. Voluntarily. I want to see him again. To talk.

We ended up in a hotel room, just me and my rapist. I was so addicted to his brutality that I couldn't bear it. We met in that hotel for weeks. I found out he was dating someone else. It drove me insane. No. If anyone was going to be fucked and beaten, it would be me. I found out where this girl lived...and I pretended to be the concerned ex girlfriend. I showed her all my police reports, my orders of protection, the pictures of my bruises, my hospital reports.

She broke up with him. Never told him why.

He was with me now. No one else is going to be beaten by him. No one but me. I was saving the world by letting him beat me instead. I was a superhero, taking one for the team.

He beat me up again. This time, I had him thrown in prison. Seven years.

He continued to write me from prison. Letters that began, "Dear Peaches" and ended with "I love you, Pooh Bear". I still have those letter even now. I can't let them go. I have all his pictures. I have everything that is left of him.

Most of all, most important, I have the scar over my left breast where he plunged a screwdriver into my chest, attempting to murder me.

I have tried to have that scar fixed, sanded down, injected. AT one time, I even considered tattooing over it.

I can't.

It's all I have left of that time of my life. It's the only reminder to me that lets me know I survived.

Do I know I am dancing on unstable ground by talking to Cassie? Certainly. Do I know how thin the ice is? Absolutely. Do I care?

Not really. I always felt the job was unfinished. I always believed I was meant to die by his hand. I feel ripped off. I feel gypped that I did not die on November 3rd, 1991 on Barteau Lane in Blue Point, New York.

My punishment for cheating death?

Living.