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?