I sent him two texts after we broke up. One, "Does it get better?" and two, "OMG--I really miss you." His response was "Sorry, don't feel like communicating right now. I don't want to say anything that I might regret later." I finished the conversation with, "Sorry to check in. Be well."

My last text to him was "Happy Hanukkah" to which he replied "Thank you!"

On December 22nd, I became Alice, slipping down the rabbit hole into a burst of nostalgia about us. Now that the break up was final, I could only remember the good. The bad and the ugly needed serious regurgitation so these remained at the edges of memory, almost disappearing in the wake of all the possibilities of a love that he had spun around me with his unrelenting intimacy everyday we were together. I could only remember how consistently randomly he loved me. We would often lie in bed in the afternoon, listening to his scratchy sunday blues, kissing, groping, making out for endless time. I was a girl again, asking him, the boy, to just love me like I have never been loved before. He revered my brown skin, my bald pussy, my small tits, my black hair, my sex-drunk eyes, my fat lower lip like he had been waiting for this combination all his life. And he would make me come just with his mouth like every sinew in my body was going to burst like blood in a clotted vein. My body hummed from the remembrances and then I burst out crying. That was not a good day. My heart broke all over again. By night time my eyes had swelled like a broken finger. I still couldn't stop the tears. I had convinced myself that I would never ever find a man who could make me feel like the last woman standing. And what made the tears fall incessantly was how callously he took it all away, making us a farce, a dallying point from which there were many exits he could take and he did. He could go kiss a random girl in a bar during the time we were temporarily broken up yet make it seem like it was nothing. To me, it was still betrayal, playing out like a broken, scratchy record. But I remained desperate for his sex godliness. For in the time he ravished me with his tongue and his words, I could imagine a love of the newsworthy kind--you know the one where the significant other dies twenty minutes after the one, being together 40 years since the first time they saw each other. Maybe I am the tragic queen of movies that produced such everlasting love. I still believe that the one I am with is the one, not someone who doesn't exist primarily because he can't. There is no perfect man only one you consider as one because he rocks your world in so many small ways. He rocked mine in one big way--sex. Of course now I know that he has trained himself very well to be this good in bed. He once gave a girl in high school a 4 hour orgasm by the sheer magic of his tongue! I believed him. For he gave me one too. He is still that good 30 years late. The man is a sensual monster. And I was his ensnared addict. What made it even worse was that we could talk. We thought of courses to teach together. He encouraged me to finish my first romance novel and I did the same for his first graphic novel. I felt I could talk to him about anything. I hid nothing. I didn't pretend to make small talk. I talked about everything as if he was my therapist. And like a good therapist he listened good. He said he respected me for all the brave choices I made in life. He even edited my academic paper and took three hours to do so! He felt like gold. I wanted him to be the gold he shone like. And he was wasn't. So you try to move on. But the problem is  not that you will never be able to move on (or at least you think you might not), the problem is living the nightmare--for not being prepared for the knife in the back even as you are orgasming. How do I resolve the insurmountable angst of remembering his beautifully angled, semi-burred face, shaded by his choicest hat with the knowledge that he betrayed me every chance he got, knowingly or unknowingly doesn't matter. Looking at him looking at me with those puppy eyes you would think you were all he ever wanted. But knowing that the two loves of his life still crossed his mind while he was wooing me, that he betrayed me with random dates and bar kisses every chance he got, that he disrespected me and my family with his betrayal, that he never betrayed ones he loved (so he didn't love me), that he never pursued me after any of the three break-ups like he did the loves of his life (one for three years after the break up) made the pain worse. I can deal with indifference because the separation is there to see, acknowledge, and move on eventually. But desperate intimacy with dangerous callousness makes both unreal and therefore unbelievable. I still fail to understand how intimacy still manages to trump the callousness in memory--because I want to believe that I was loved? That I could finally imagine that my love story can be complete? Or is this simply about denial? That maybe my love story can never be. Maybe I am not meant to find that one in this life time. That this lifetime is laboring to get there in another.