How the past creeps up...

It took me a while to figure out why I'm having such a difficult time laying down and closing my eyes.  Suddenly it occurred to me that July 7th had arrived and it just crept in out of nowhere.  Four years ago, I married a man that I thought I could settle for and in a way I felt I owed him for allowing me to stay with him rather than being stuck in a tiny two bedroom house with ten or more people in it.  I think I felt I could help him learn to live rather than wait to die.  Living with an enlarged heart and congestive heart failure cannot possibly be easy, but life wasn't over yet.  If time is short, then one must make the most of it.  Apparently, my trial was a failure from the moment I said "I do."  I cannot say that I loved him the way a wife should love her husband, but I loved him as a any friend would love a friend.  I wanted to be there for him and help him find sunshine before his last day arrived.  I tried and failed.  Maybe I didn't try hard enough.  If I tried more, maybe his personality wouldn't have changed so completely after we married. 

So, I'm struggling with this because this is the first year I can't make a choice to pick up the phone and say "I'm sorry for leaving you.  Can we try to be friends?"  I can't fix it.  I don't have any chance to mend our relationship to where we could at least have a friendship.  He's been gone since November.  Sometimes I have nightmares about him coming back and succeeding in strangling me.  Or the knife he threw at me found a home in my neck.  And the only thing I feel in those dreams is that I deserve the treatment.  For some god awful reason, I deserve every single bad thing that ever happens to me.  I know it's not true.

And then I begin to wonder if Josh is even making the right decision in wanting to marry me.  Of course we won't be getting married until next Spring due to some financial issues.  Which, of course, is ultimately my fault because I can't seem to keep a job. 

I swear to the gods, I'm going to hyperventilate and just kill over one of these days.  I want to turn my brain off, but once it gets going it just won't stop.  It goes from one thing, to another, to another... Just an endless list of failures and moments where I lack the effort to do things right. 

I even tell Josh some of my thoughts.  In a way, I'm glad that I'm able to tell him.  Other times I scare the crap out of him.  For two weeks solid, all I wanted to do was vanish off the face of the Earth.  Just go where nobody could find me and where nobody knew me.  I wouldn't contact my past at all, just live a life of loneliness, just like I deserve and not look back.  Yes, that included Josh, simply because I don't want to fail anymore.  I even went as far as telling him that I absolutely refused to marry him.  I don't want to hurt anybody, yet all I do is hurt someone.  Always!  I hurt somebody when I came into the relationship I'm in right now.  It was wrong.  Even after all this time, I still feel the guilt.  It's like lead in my soul, just weighing me down...  So much guilt for everything I've done in my life.  And I just know that I'm going to keep failing.

Everything's going to work out somehow.  Somehow... it just has to... I'm tired of running, of hiding, of crying and failing.