I've ruined everything that I've ever loved.

When I meet him we are colleagues at a chain coffee shop. We both like to follow the rules but I am better at it than he is and this drives him insane. I mismark cups on purpose to see how far I can push him. He proposes to me at the end of our first shift together after I write raz g.tea instead of R GT. I decide that I will keep him as mine only under the condition that he continues to make me feel the way he does on this day.

I realize I am not pretending when I find myself getting jealous of the girl he knows through Twitter. When he talks about her I know it isn't going to work. She is young, and deceptive, and weak. She is only comforted by the idea of him, his body terrifies her. It elates me. I express my feelings for him on a Starbucks cup. I think that he accepts.

He drives his mother’s car to Washington DC to take her on a first date. The night he comes back he meets me at our work and kisses me in the parking lot. Not just the spot near my car but in the middle of the thoroughfare. He is wearing an FBC kit only at the time I don’t know it is called a kit and he scolds me because I call it a jersey. I purposefully wear that black dress. We eat dinner at the restaurant across the parking lot and I drink beers because I am nervous about being on a date with someone who doesn’t drink.

My best friend calls me because she is injured and I make him go with me to Wegman’s to purchase an ACE bandage and some aspirin. We deliver the supplies and we play darts in her apartment because I am too drunk to drive and he beats me. We go to the beach and come close to being arrested for trespassing as we are making love on a rock. The police officer that is at the scene is one of the regular customers at our coffee shop.

The distance from me to him is 458 miles. Or three years. Whichever comes first. There will be a time when we think it will be too hard to keep going. It is hard because I am in a city looking at the same thing he is looking at in a different city. We will learn to live this way, but not yet.

I am concerned that our entire relationship can be chalked up to these markings on Starbucks cups, me taking his last name, a shot, and mutual hate for things. When he writes my name on his arm I am concerned that I will feel compelled to write his name on my arm as well. Every man after him will have to live with the fact that they are not the first man to do this.

I write love letters to him on the bar because we cannot exist outside of this place.

And I love the sound of you walking away.

I don’t know how to say “thank you” for breaking my heart and actually mean it, because to say that you broke my heart would imply that you have some power over me still.  And that I still had a heart for you to break.  That is simply untrue.

I have no illusions about you anymore.  You are a child in a man’s body.  You do man things like mow the lawn, change your oil, and use your penis but you still have to tell me that you don’t love me anymore over the phone.  And that is okay.  Because you are someone else’s problem now.

Now I am my own problem too.  I have to put myself to bed when I've had too much to drink and cook enough food for just myself and find a new way to wash the middle of my back since I shower alone.  But it’s doable. 

When I sit at the coffee shop now, I can go back to imagining my pretend life with other men.  I can think about the fancy parties that adults go to, and the problem of choosing the right wine to go with the cedar smoked salmon, and who’s car we will take for our weekend trip to The City.  These are the problems I want to have.  Instead I think about how I will bury a friend.

I am taking an online class on Computer Science offered by a school I never thought I would attend.  It has made me think about life in ones and zeros.  Either it exists, or it doesn't exist.  Either I remember you or I don’t.  I choose to remember you or I don’t.  But as soon as I remember that I chose to forget you, I remember you.  And the solid line between ones and zeros fades away. My heart breaks just a little more.

Never is a promise and you can't afford to lie.

I am supposed to be writing a memoir. Instead I am drinking beer and being consumed with computer solitaire. The feeling I get when I flip move a red seven to a black eight only to find another red seven underneath it is paramount to madness, I’m certain. At the very least it is the same feeling I had when you said, “forever” and then when I flipped over your card you said, “goodbye.”

When you throw away a person they do not go away. Leaving a person isn’t as easy as dying. You still have to look over your shoulder in the grocery store and hastily remember license plate numbers when you see someone driving the same car as the discarded person. You have to remember how to eat the foods you ate while you were with that person and drive the places you used to drive to before you knew them. Breaking up is a lot like quitting cigarettes. I am doing both at the same time.

Then there comes a time when you learn how to do things you used to do with the discarded person with a new person. I am learning how to be alone. And it isn’t that being alone is bad, but it can be bad for me. Being alone makes me anxious. I think one part of it is that I feel like I am being left out of something but the other part of me is worried that if I start to be comfortable being alone then I might become comfortable with other things too. How do we learn to disassociate lonely from alone? How do I?

The new person I am learning to do things with is smarter than I am which leads me to try harder to impress him. I think the hardest part of being in a relationship is remembering who you were before you had a relationship. But maybe the best part is deciding who you want to be from now on. I want to be me.

There are always those moments when you think that you could have saved it from falling apart. But I think the older I get I realize that things fall apart so that other things can come together. I haven’t figured out why this is important yet. I do feel like dating when I was a teenager either prepared me for this or ruined it for me. When you date someone while you live with your parents you can't fathom the idea of doing things without your other. But as an adult why would I want to?