Free at last!

It’s happened to a lot of us.

At some time in our lives, we fell for someone who did not fall for us. Or we fell for someone who fell for us for a month, a year, five years, and then went away. Maybe he relocated to Australia to explore the Great Barrier Reef, or maybe he just moved into a basement apartment in Brooklyn with a girl who designs wire jewelry.

And we were left utterly, shatteringly alone.

It doesn’t matter how long ago he left, every time we come across his picture, or run into a mutual friend, or hear a song that came on in the car as we rode to the beach with him, it all comes flooding back. We remember the set of his shoulders the first time he told us he loved us. We remember how he gently swabbed the sand out of our ears with the corner of his towel.

We’re happy thinking about these things, and then we start wondering where it started to go wrong. We start thinking that if we’d said this or done that, we could still be with him today. And suddenly, we’re bereft. And angry. Read more »