Bitterness

My shame gnaws at me like a famished thing. I've felt it swallowing me throughout the years: consuming me and eroding me. How to run from a bitterness turned from others and thus unto myself? How to forgive amid the loathing and despair? Weak, I was. Always weak, and much like a famished thing myself. I didn't have the strength  to tell the truth, blinded as I was by fear and confusion.
Ah, I hated them; I hated them for the way they looked at me, when I knew the things that I did at the time. I despised the injustice sealed away -- this filthy little secret-- behind closed doors.
But wasn't I the one who truly faltered? Throat closing up rapidly, tears running rampant down my despairing face; I ran from those eyes with a false confession on my lips. Perhaps the truth wouldn't have been so hard to believe if I had actually told it. I simply hadn't been strong enough. And at night, I cried over my own failure. I was only a child, but I prayed that I could die in my sleep and be reborn. I wanted to be anyone, anything, other than myself. I prayed that the person that I was would die.
I never wanted to feel those eyes that smoldered with rebuke saying, "Tell the truth!"
The truth was always first on my tongue, only to be twisted and vomited back out as the lie.
THE LIE.
Why did I lie to them? Why did I let them conquer me and manipulate me into telling them the lie that they so wanted to hear? How could I betray myself so horribly?
Ah, I may be far, far from perfect now, but I was very close to it then. I only wanted them to love me, to keep me. But I was too weak, and in my weakness I destroyed my chance to be loved, and I am close to being cast away and forgotten by them, with relief on their part.
I am so bitter. How could I have been so weak?