Here is a thing you don’t know unless you, too, have left someone it nearly killed you to leave, and that is when you cleave from someone who doesn’t want to break up, you have to find a cold steel core inside yourself to stand firm; you have to become a more unfeeling version of yourself, that same Stepford You who, in your naïveté, in the thrall of your first taste of honesty in three years, you believed you’d now cleanly left behind. You have to resist nostalgia, resist memory, resist the plurality of love. But at the finality of never spending another night together again, that façade of myself cracked, leaving only the unprotected, naked me under its shell. And so it became the season I sobbed hysterically, pleading, “Don’t go, you can’t leave like this—I’ll do anything you want.” It became the season of rushing into his closet and sinking onto its floor in a ball, a howling animal made as compact as I could get as though this would make him pack me, too. Instead, he said sadly, “Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Not anymore,” and zipped his bag. It was the season he left the room while I screamed in blind pain on his closet floor. [...]