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That day at the cabin, the embers of us still sparking in the skin across my lover’s veins, he’d exhaled smoke and said, “I really shouldn’t be doing this,” and we laughed because few things feel so good as to be beyond one’s control—because I’d spent my entire life believing that with pain came da…

[...] I remember the way he dropped to sleep in my arms, every single time we shared a bed, as though he had never had insomnia in his life. I remember how we used to laugh until our bodies convulsed, like the bad kids in the back of a classroom. I remember the way he could recite entire pages of F…

There is the Angry Man narrative, the Bad Mother narrative, even the Cheating Whore and They Were Never Compatible to Begin With narratives, but there is also this:

1) The time in our twenties, when I was claustrophobic while getting an MRI and my husband came and sat at a chair next to my feet …

My lover’s wife is sick with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, and the reason he doesn’t want to come clean is that he does not want to “cause her more pain,” which is obviously not consistent with the fact that he is fucking another woman, but there it is. That is who we are—my lover and I, and of…

By the end of February, when my Not Yet Lover came to Chicago for a conference and I picked him up at O’Hare, I got out of the car to greet him even though it was freezing, because I didn’t want to miss the chance to hug him. He was staying in our basement, which my husband and I had dubbed “The Vi…