I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.

Men and the pursuit of them are strongly intertwined with my mental health. I would say, in my defensive defense, that the problem with being a serial monogamist is, there isn't anybody random or unimportant: everybody you sleep with really means something, which is to say each of them is on your public record. At some point I wake up thinking, Fuck this! I don't want another man in my bed ever again. What I really want is a cat.

In hindsight, I have no idea why he was ever with me. He thought highly of my breasts. And . . . that's it, I think.

It's as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don't think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It's just that I was me. It was all I had.

People don't know. We don't know ourselves so we tell ourselves what we really know is other people. We could say the depth of pain we feel for the lovers who've left us is because we knew them so well.

No one ever loved you like him. And no one ever took it away so completely. But it's here. Look around.

You want to know, but are afraid to ask, whether or not I found someone. If there could be anyone to fill that hole in my heart after I lost him. I did. "Life is futile," says my new therapist, Michaela, "and no one gets out of it alive. There is only love.

I finally accept that not only do I not understand the death of my relationship, but I do not need to. These men were good and kind to me, they loved me and I loved them back and the shock at the finish holds no wisdom. The revelation is not that I lost them, but that I had them.

When he asked if he was mine, tears in his eyes, I think he knew what he would do, what he would have to do, and he was mourning us. He was mourning us the whole time.