It is something you’ll come to months or years later, if at all: the possibility that the way he was with you was real, and that it was love; that the way he was with the other woman, real or imagined, was real, was love, as well. You might understand this in the middle of the next time you fall in love with someone else, and find yourself, still, in love with him. You’ve just spread your love out in time, and he has spread it out in space.

But that is exactly what you can’t get to, the perspective of time, when your gaze is frozen on the image of him turning away. You’re suffering from the same illusion as both Echo and Narcissus: only one person can be the center of another person’s world at any given time, and ideally, this would always be you. This is where all the narcissistic romance websites invite you to be: in the center of the world, stuck in time, assessing the moral status of others, until love is gone.