you can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness

Now there's enough distance so it feels like that happened to someone else.

In all these cases, the damage was done before you knew you were damaged. 
The worst part was that, as the years passed, these memories became, in the way you kept them in a secret box in your head, taking them out every so often to turn them over and over, something like dear possessions.

I never expected for it to all come back when I cracked the cover.

A friend had given me a cautionary disclaimer: "I had to put it down because it reminded me of my past relationship- it made me cry"- which rather than steering me away piqued my interest. The apple just hovered there and I simply had to taste it.

 As I read, what always happens when we read happened.
In stories of love and loss, we always look for the parallels to our own life narrative, the characters that we read into being mirrors of ourselves, the relationships that end up spanning chapters or are reduced to a footnote.
 Reading it, reflecting on the relationship that I had and lost, losing that safety of separation that time gives, hurts but it's a kind of numb pain.
Like when novocaine starts to kick in
but you can vaguely understand that what they are doing is painful
so you remain in this paralyzed state
 the knowledge of the pain that you should feel but strangely don't, hurting you more than a physical reaction

Her story parallels my own in ways I can never admit aloud
the intoxication of knowing that you are pivotal force standing
between life and despair for another
it's the way heroin might feel if it were a conscious being
And you know as you've known all along the more that you are consumed-
the stronger the addiction
That's what that relationship was
not love but an devouring force

 The truth was that we both were- on either ends of spectrum- addicted
Him to me the object against loneliness
and me to being the object
Objectification feels attractive when you slip it on once in awhile

But the cold hard unvarnished truth
is that I didn't have enough strength to leave
The deeper he took me into the forest- the more closely I followed
He took me to place that that the preening sorority girls
Who found absolution in the bottom of a bottle
couldn't even comprehend
but at the end he pulled himself out and left
I became a person that you could leave.

We haven't spoken in two years.
I've fallen in love again.
I am happy.
I won.

  You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her make you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you know who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences.