When I arrived at the address she’d given I found nothing but an empty lot. I checked the note again—I was in the right place. I waited a few minutes; then, as I turned to leave, I noticed a rope ladder swaying from the abandoned elevated track that ran above Tenth Avenue. One bare arm waved at the top, then slid out of sight, and even now, all these years later, I do not understand how I had the nerve to climb that ladder. It was the first time since childhood that I discovered I was capable of more than I’d previously believed, an expanding sense of possibility that defined my years with her—a stark contrast to the smallness I felt in Henry’s home. Once I reached the top of the tracks she helped me over the edge—her hands on my arms and back. I stood and looked out over an impossible sight—a long, narrow meadow running through the city, overgrown with vines and tall grass.

When I got out of the taxi minutes later, I realized I’d mistakenly given my old address, on East Second and Bowery, an efficiency studio with wonderful light and terrible everything else. I looked up at the windows where I’d lived in such happy squalor, and cried. How completely idiotic I was being. It makes no sense to grieve years. Be reasonable. Go home.

As I walked north toward our building, I lingered at each of my private graves on Second Avenue—the bench where I’d had the relationship-ending fight with a girlfriend several years ago, the bar where I’d read The House of Mirth for the first time, the café where I’d once met my estranged father for a painful coffee, and the Italian restaurant where Henry and I had soberly discussed the decision of marriage. I’d always been someone over whom the past had a powerful hold, easily importuned by nostalgia, but that evening each of these locations seemed to have lost their power. I walked right into the café where I’d had that coffee with my father, though for years I’d crossed the street to avoid passing it. I ordered a glass of wine as if I belonged there, had belonged there all along.

I repeated that I was leaving, but he scoffed, almost laughed. Not just like that you’re not, he said, and we walked in silence for several blocks and I wondered whether there was any ideal criteria for this, whether there was a correct way to end a marriage on nothing more than an amorphous sense of another life just out of reach, a life that might kill me, it seemed, if I didn’t live it. Once inside our apartment again, he asked me to at least keep living with him for another month, to accompany him to his cousin’s wedding, to give him a chance to make the case for our life together, and I agreed to it, hoping that it would make sense, that the simpler course—staying together, staying the same—would come to seem to be the correct course.

X was not exactly a person to me yet, but a possibility, a different way of life. I deified her then and for a long time after, believed her to be an oracle, almost inhuman. Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root. She was always human, difficult as it was for me to admit that; I made so much trouble for myself by refusing to see it.