Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 14

Good Man

We didn’t talk about whether or not I would go back to Jack’s and my home after the operation, or to my parents’ place. It was just never discussed—at least not with me, or at least not while I was awake—who would care for me in the days after. It was assumed that the only people who would take me in this condition were my parents, that they had been the first to love me as I was pulled naked and screaming out of my mother’s flayed belly, and they would be the ones to love me now.

We arrived back to their apartment, where a mattress sat on the floor in a very white room with very high ceilings that was full of most of my brother’s worldly possessions, although he had barely ever spent a night there. In the closet, his cargo pants with abstract Sharpie drawings all over the ripped knees, an assortment of my father’s old dress shirts he had worn through college. On the bedside table—the pink plastic one that had been in so many of our childhood bedrooms—a shell he’d found on the beach in Goa, a feather, a piece of pottery he made when he liked some girl who liked pottery. A stack of books on radical urban planning. A copy of the undergraduate thesis he wrote in three frenzied days. His smell, faint but there, a little bit like sweat, salt, wet earth, and cooperative living.

In that room, I was on a schedule. Full glass of water, two pills. Piece of toast, please just a little. More water, two more pills. I wasn’t asleep and I wasn’t awake. I wasn’t afraid because I wasn’t aware. I know that I had my phone, and I responded to messages—any message, at any hour, from anyone. But I also know that I had been very high, high for so many days, that I no longer felt high and wondered if the pills were doing anything at all. My stomach, sutured and bruised, bloated and empty, didn’t bother me. The November chill came through big drafty windows. Someone I didn’t know very well sent me a teddy bear as large as a cocker spaniel and I clutched it with my thin, shaky arms. There was nothing to be sad about. There was nothing to cry about. There was nothing.

That’s why what happened next is so confusing. That at this moment, when I was not here, not there, not anywhere, when I had ostensibly died inside my own body, I would do the one thing in my career, in my life, about which I felt—feel, still—genuine shame. Everything that had come before was child’s play, either because it was false, or because it was ultimately silly, or because it didn’t really affect anyone deeply—since we know affecting people and irritating them just enough to get them to tweet are really not the same thing.

Out of respect for the people involved, some of whom I care about deeply and some of whom I cared about deeply once, I will not describe this thing, except to say that it happened on November 17, 2017, which means—and I can only figure this out based on dates in hospital records and time stamps on the Internet—that I had only gotten home from the hospital that morning. Therefore, how I managed to make a public statement, much less a careless, blithe, and damaging one about a subject that should only ever have been approached with full-spirited care and precision—confounds me to this day.

I know that Jenni had come in from Los Angeles to see me. I know that we made the statement together, in response to a “request for comment,” and it was decided over text message only hours after I got home. I know my mother had tried to hold on to my phone, saying there was no comment needed. “This isn’t you,” she implored me, and I wondered who it was. Maybe, I thought, there had been an accident—“Lena Dunham” had died and someone else had been reincarnated into this failing body instead of the fresh one they were promised. At this point, Jenni and I were barely in touch, save for intermittent texts I tried to keep appealingly casual, yet somehow together the statement was written and published, and before I even knew it was online, I was receiving messages—so many messages—asking why. During my entire career, whenever something exploded online, people I knew went quiet, were tentative, danced around it. Now they wrote missives asking why. Often, when I opened them, I had no idea what they were talking about—it was like waking from a dream back into life and, for a moment, having no idea where you are or what is true. Every text I got—even the kinder ones, from people who knew what was happening behind the scenes and therefore how compromised I really was—confused me. Am I awake now? Okay, am I awake now?

I could try—would have tried, if I had written this book any earlier—to explain to you all of the backstory that informed the statement I don’t remember writing, the specificity of the relationships, the obligations and emotions bound up in the decision to defend someone against an accusation I had no business attempting to debunk, no clear reason to fight, no fucking right to an opinion on. But none of that matters. It does not materially change what happened, the shame I feel about it, or—most crucially—the pain it caused. I was so deep in my own distress—physical, emotional, existential—that I had ceased to be able to imagine or invest in anyone else’s. Empathy—the most important quality in a writer, a woman, a friend, all of the things I once had been and had no idea if I would ever be again—had left me. In a sense, this is the narcissism of fame in its purest form. Like some abstract monster in an H. P. Lovecraft novel, the threat that had hovered above me for the last seven years had finally descended and taken me into its guts, taken the guts out of me. I thought of what Dr. Seckin had said about hysterectomies—they steal a woman’s soul—and I felt the last brick being placed on my tomb.

Guilt and shame are hideous emotions—they’re hideous when they’re unearned, inherited, bestowed by culture or a cruel lover or friend. They’re even more hideous when they’re the result of actions you have to admit are your own, deeds you cannot blame anyone else for. The reason that Alcoholics Anonymous is built on the idea of atoning is because, unless you can find a way to live with that very bad thing, integrate it meaningfully into your life, give it purpose so that it guides you and perhaps others away from committing similar sins—you will drink, drug, use sex, money, people, and power to try and forget. Killing yourself slowly to say sorry to someone else isn’t just useless—it’s cowardly.

I didn’t know, in those early days, what this event would come to mean—to the people affected, to me, to Jenni, to the people who loved me. I didn’t see a path through it, and there was no path around it. I had no tools for apologizing, for making amends, or for understanding why it had happened in the first place. And so I stopped, then and there, and gave up. I lay down and I didn’t get up, really, for a very long time. In the quiet of that room, in the isolation of the aftermath, I did not decide to kill myself, but I did think it was time to die. That distinction may not make sense to everyone, but it will make sense to a lot of people. I was not going to take the decisive action to end my life. But I was going to cease fighting to survive by avoiding food, by drinking almost no water, through the carelessness of mixing pills, and by acting—for all intents and purposes—like I was dead already. This could be perceived as self-involved, dramatic, as making my own pain central to someone else’s story, or it could be perceived as what it was: a wish, not quite conscious because nothing was, to cease to exist, to put my worn-out body—and therefore my worn-out, overused, threadbare name—to sleep forever. To spare others the exhausting loop of reacting to reactions to me, to rid their lives of this disquiet. It was time, I thought. Certainly, it was time.

In the days after the surgery, people visited the cold room with the mattress on the floor. My mother greeted them all, offered them tea and rugelach, had the conversations I could not, and then led them to me. America. Zadie, upon whom my mother foisted a pair of boots she had never worn. Autumn. Hari, to whom I gave my The Row beige cashmere sweater, as if I were on my deathbed delegating my personal effects to my children. Riz, who just happened to be staying in the apartment upstairs, and who didn’t have long to visit but inspired me to wash my hair. Russell came all the way from LA with nothing but a backpack and his unyielding love, and I sat on the toilet for the duration of his visit. Audrey, whom I had not spoken to in well over a year, learned about the surgery from a mutual friend and appeared hours after hearing, somber in her thick black tights, perched at the end of the bed, a reminder that no matter what we had said to and about each other throughout our twenties, she would be there, wide-eyed and speechless, when irreversible things happened. I would never carry a child. That was true. But right after the scalpel finally unbound my uterus from the tissue that bound it to my other organs for good, I made a decision that meant I would never be the person who hadn’t made that decision.

“Maybe you just wanted to set fire to your life,” Russell said, through the bathroom door. “Could it be that simple? You didn’t know how else to do it, so you did the best you could.”

That first day home, it had just been Jenni, who came but didn’t stay. We were already focused on the Big Bad Thing that we had done, and I remember the sound of her crying, confused and afraid, but expectant—as if I might have a solution. I remember listening to a call between various public relations people and occasionally reminding myself to say, “Yes, okay, yes.” I remember the way she looked at me—with mild disgust, or was it concern, or were they the same, really, in the end. Maybe it was the brackish color of my skin, or the tiny blue sprout of hair that made me look—at best—like one of the original Troll dolls. Maybe it was the tragedy of a room free of personal effects, of the fact that none of the people who were supposed to want to care for me—Jack, my brother—were there, and yet I was talking about them in a singsong voice, like Miss Havisham. Maybe she saw, in me, the rancid union that had created this thing we were now having a public relations call about. But a large part of me felt that, now that I was here, emptied of my capital, my talent, my ability to open doors or create opportunities, sucked dry of the gifts that had made me such an appealing investment, she was done. You don’t like me anymore? I thought. But you made me. Frankenstein’s Feminist, a good little girl stitched together from spare parts, with a borrowed gun in her hand. I often fired the bullets, but you planned all the crimes. You promised to be there when I escaped out the back of the bank, but instead you took off at the first sign of the cops and started a new life in Canada.

After ten days, I tried going back to Jack’s and my home for a night. He welcomed me sweetly, guided me from the door to the bed like a rich orphan returning from the sanatorium to some rich uncle’s home in a Victorian novel—“We are thrilled to have you, Tilly! We hope to treat you like our heart’s own daughter.” But after ten minutes, we were on different iPads, watching different shows, and I could tell he was surprised by how often I needed a hand up out of bed, by how little noise I made, and the next morning, I called my parents and said, “She may not be quite ready to be back.”

The next week, he planned a visit. My mother combed my hair like a little dolly. She put me in a headband and dangly earrings, satin lounge pants, lipstick. She made me smile and pose in a photo by the living room window and sent it to Jack—“She’s all ready for you!” It felt—I looked—like I was entering into a marriage arranged by my conservative rabbi. Just ask him what his interests are. Tell him how you’ve always wanted to be a mother. Eight, nine, ten kids—the sky’s the limit. You are a woman who loves to care for others. You are a woman who loves to keep a home. You are a woman who knows the value of a dollar, how to respect and revere her husband, who comes only second to God.

Jack and I had our worst-ever fight—not our final fight, because we’d keep doing that for years, but our final fight as a couple—in my parents’ bed two weeks after my hysterectomy. It was the kind of fight where people say things that they cannot ever walk back, that ring in your head at four a.m. forever, unless you do huge amounts of ayahuasca or you die. He made it clear what he thought about my illness, my self-pity, my approach to public life (“It’s like you want all these people who love your work to HATE you—artists are supposed to make people happy and you just don’t care”), and my ability to be a committed and loving partner and, worse still, mother. How could he commit to a life and family with me, he wondered, if I couldn’t even move past an event like this? He wasn’t wrong—he was just late to express his reservations—and if I hadn’t already been bedbound, that’s where I would have ended up after this.

I’m sure he felt the same way about what I said, but at the time, I had no space to be charitable. I had tried to tell him how scared I was about my increasing dependence on medication. “I’m afraid…” I stammered. “That I may be addicted…to all this medicine.” His response was to go to the bathroom and angrily flush all my pills down the toilet, which necessitated a call to the doctor and a late-night trip to the pharmacy to get more so that I wouldn’t go into withdrawal—from any one of the drugs—overnight.

When he returned with the meds, his face was rigid with disgust. I must have looked pitiful—unwashed, hair patchy, nothing to offer. I’m sure he was scared. I’m sure he was lonely. But all I knew in the moment was that—after years of small admissions, moments in which his doubt in my goodness and wholeness emerged—he had finally spoken to me in ways I had never been spoken to, never heard between my parents even as they battled and raged, never allowed, even when I was lying under the worst men, having the worst things happen. I thought at the time I was too tired to say them back—with hindsight, I realize I’m actually constitutionally incapable of it.

Instead, I cried and begged Jack not to go, and he spent the night begrudgingly. We ordered takeout and watched that Black Mirror episode about the lesbians that always makes everyone cry. Then he rose early, putting back on his Where’s Waldo outfit of a striped T-shirt and flood pants. He was leaving for tour, and we agreed we would pause our relationship, and address what needed addressing later—when things had calmed down. I hugged him at the door. He patted my back. I limped back to bed, exhausted.

I decided, then and there, that the only thing that could save me was to be wanted.

I met a boy who I will call Nick when I was eight. He was a neighbor in the summer community we had just moved to, a Dirty Dancing –style mess of wooden houses around a lake, yards full of dirt bikes and canoes, a marina. I was sitting on the browning grass in my new front yard in a blue cotton dress, self-seriously mimicking the classic Christina’s World pose, when I saw someone peeking around a tree. He was short, stubby, and wearing a gorilla mask and a pair of rainbow suspenders.

“Who are you?” I asked, and he disappeared back behind the tree as if he were a mirage.

He claims—I don’t remember this, which is a first—that I once rejected going on a bike ride with him because I said that I was “tapping inspiration” as I journaled in the hammock. We spent five or six summers as bickering foils, occasionally holding hands in his dinghy on the lake, over the lily pads and under the covered bridge. Once I purposely fell out of a boat just so he could rescue me. But instead of diving in, he laughed and paddled away.

We took hikes and careened off the path. We rode bikes together, and I took my shirt off as a rejection of gender roles, riding for almost a mile with both of our flat chests exposed to the hot wind.

One afternoon on his bed, when we were twelve, I laid my head across his soft stomach, the thick maroon cotton of his Comedy Central T-shirt, and we stayed like that for several minutes.

In sixth grade, there was an interschool dance. He called my landline and asked me to be his date, bringing me a single red rose. Once there, he ignored me, starting a fight with a boy from another class and flashing his pocketknife. I refused his calls after that. He was sent off to a boarding school with a focus on discipline, where he wrestled and got his private pilot’s license at sixteen. I went to a high school with a focus on being yourself and trying heroin. A mutual friend lost her virginity to him on the couch in the lake house across the street from mine, and they had to turn the cushion over so his mother wouldn’t see her blood on the white fabric.

At eighteen, I re-met him in the hall of Eugene Lang College on 12th Street. I was spending a year there, with a plan to transfer. He’d been kicked out of a frat school for doing fratty things that were too fratty even for a frat school. By this point, I was deeply committed to drag-adjacent alt fashion—1950s house dresses, cherry-red pleather heels, and oversize faux furs with a smear of coral lipstick, which I wore to queer parties where girls with mustaches painted on their upper lips licked my neck and sucked my earlobes. In his collared shirt and khakis, he looked lost among all the kids with asymmetrical haircuts.

His childish chub had evaporated, and he was sinewy and lean. I didn’t yet know that wrestling in the lowest weight class at his high school had made him a certified male bulimic. We greeted each other with a knowing laugh. You again.

That night, I let Nick push and pull me all around the bunk beds in my dorm room before he refused to fuck me because I was a virgin, no matter how hard I insisted that I had the ability to compartmentalize and would not “get too crazy or attached.” He told me, at the wizened age of nineteen, that “girls always get attached.”

I didn’t see Nick again until a Christmas party at my childhood friend Isabel’s house ten years later. Isabel’s Christmas party—an event that attracted half the downtown art world, where a large roast ham was consumed before pecan pralines, where a piñata was always burst so that holiday candy rained on the children, where we once tried to shut her brother out of her bedroom and accidentally slammed the door so hard, he lost the top half of one finger and had to be hospitalized for a week while it was reattached, thanks to the quick-thinking adult who put it in a cup of ice and handed it to the ambulance driver.

I had already been famous for four or five years. I was in a thin phase, and a sick phase, but the weight loss had inspired me to start wearing cropped jackets and minidresses—not the goofy, frilly ones I once favored, but the kind of streamlined outfits you put together when you know you’re young and hot. Thigh-high boots. A single gold necklace. Mauve lips. Jack wasn’t with me—he didn’t like Christmas, or what he viewed as the exhausting pretensions of the people I grew up around, or probably, really, at this point, me.

The estrogen had just started returning to my body, springing back with triple the power, and I remember a kind of all-consuming horniness directed at nobody and also the entire world. I had gone from no estrogen to all the estrogen, bounding back like so many rabid attack dogs, and there was almost no man I met whom I didn’t consider, for a moment, what it might be like to fuck.

I saw Nick across the room—changed, but unmistakable, dressed more conservatively than anyone else, looking like a lost IT tech with sick biceps. His face had slimmed down and acquired a muscular prettiness. It’s an odd, out-of-body sensation when one person has been many people to you. Some part of me knew that he would be a few more.

I approached him. “You again.”

“Lena, Lena, Lena.” I tingled from head to toe. We talked around talking, but I got the basic details—he was now a welder, traveling from construction site to construction site. The job had taken him to Iceland, Haiti, the Hamptons. He told me he was sober now, that he lived in Harlem and was dating a lawyer named Ronit who kept him on the straight and narrow (he had, at first, referred to her as his roommate until I pressed the matter).

I tried to walk around the party, but I couldn’t stop looking at him, for him. The desire was so dense, I was sick with it, bending at the waist, swaying on my heels despite not having had anything to drink. I didn’t register that despite his sobriety tale, he was holding a beer. I wasn’t trained to look for those things yet.

At the end of the night, when I saw he was leaving, I rushed out into the frigid night without my coat to ask him…What did I want to ask him?

Instead, he asked me: “So will we see each other every ten years, forever?”

Nick and I had stayed in intermittent email contact. Sometimes he sent me a smirking selfie. Other times he just wrote my name. “Lena.” I had avoided real responses out of a sense that adultery was something that demented women in novels did, but nothing was clear anymore.

I had never stopped flirting—I mean, I wasn’t dead yet —but I had observed careful boundaries, never taking it far enough that I could be declared out of bounds. If I’d wanted to look, perhaps I may have seen that Jack was not observing them as closely as I was. I wasn’t paying attention, but the Internet sure was, and they made some pretty amazing PowerPoints on the issue, so convincing they had me rethinking events that I myself had been present for. Later, at my most desperate, I DMed the PowerPoint maker, who didn’t seem to have any particular fondness for me—“She sucks but she got done dirty.” I wanted to prove I was in on it, that I could take a joke, that I wasn’t, in fact, morphing into a pile of packing peanuts. She immediately asked if I wanted to go on her podcast. I did not.

Up until now, I had seen myself as some kind of half wife, and so I had observed wifely code (you can masturbate thinking about someone oxidizing metal, but you can’t touch!). But the events of the past few weeks had changed the game, and it was every woman for herself, just trying to survive. And so I wrote to Nick with impunity, saying I’d just had major surgery and I needed to be cheered up. “Meet me by the bridge? Bring me a stuffed animal?”

I got an answer back in less than a minute: “I’m already running.”

He arrived just when he said he would—no stuffed animal, but yes running—and we started to walk through the subzero Brooklyn night. My leg still throbbed as I hobbled up the ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge behind him. He started to tell me a little bit about his life—he had spent the summer in rehab, sharing a room with a certain former president’s brother. He had just moved out of his sober living house and was starting to think about work again.

I didn’t try and sugarcoat anything, to make him think I was living a fancy life in a fancy industry. I told him about the endless hours in the hospital, my limited mobility, my crumbling relationship, the hysterectomy I’d had less than a month ago. When we reached the bridge’s midpoint, I stopped, stared, and suggested that we hug, an idea he accepted without further questions, wrapping his arms around me, squeezing me like that important machine Temple Grandin invented to soothe cows. It worked.

I let my lips wander slowly across his face and onto his, and I remembered how my high school friend Marissa’s mother once told us how, when she conducted an affair in the 1970s, cheating on her first husband with Marissa’s father, she insisted on wearing a red velvet cape with a hood everywhere she went, ostensibly to hide her identity but more likely to celebrate it. “An adulteress cape,” she called it.

I was wearing a sweater the size of an airstream trailer, but I, too, was ready to do adultery.

He suggested we walk to his apartment, but first he needed to stop and get weed from the back room of a Dominican grocery store on the Lower East Side. I said I was down for the ride, never questioning how weed and rehab worked as bedfellows. Who was I to ask questions, buzzing away on two OxyContin and a Klonopin for good measure? In the cab, we hugged again, and I said this: “I’ve been through something awful. I don’t want to talk about it, but I need you to fuck me and I need you to do all of the work.”

“I can make that happen,” he said.

I had been told by the doctor I should abstain from intercourse for at least six weeks. At the time, it had seemed like a joke—as if I were being told to abstain from climbing Mount Everest or creating an app that revolutionized calorie counting for the modern mother. In what fucking universe was I going to fuck ?

But back in the small, tidy room he was renting, he did what I asked, taking the lead. He pulled my sweater up and kissed my freezing tits. He made his way down my stomach. As he pulled my pants off, he noticed the Heparin bruises.

“Did I do that?” He smirked, running a rough hand across all that purple.

“No,” I said. “They removed my uterus.”

“I’m gonna be honest. I’m not totally sure what a uterus is.”

I kissed him urgently, a sort of barbaric thank-you. I wanted to forget what a uterus was also. He was going to make that happen. And quick, let’s hope, because I only had twenty minutes before my helicopter mom was going to want me to take an Extra Strength Tylenol and half a Percocet and get the fuck into bed. I didn’t tell him that only that morning, a website had written an article entitled, “Has Lena Dunham Finally Hung Herself?” or that I was living in my parents’ guest room with two teddy bears and an economy-sized box of Fleet mineral oil enemas.

Within moments, he was licking my pussy and putting all his stubby fingers inside me at once, but this time I liked it. He was spitting in his hand, and then he was fucking me. I felt something inside me, distanced by the medication but there nonetheless. It was a shift, a rip, a pain that felt once again like pleasure, and I gasped. I didn’t have to tell him to slow down. He just did. And I just lay there, as promised, letting it all happen to me. I was grounded and coming in for a landing and up in space spinning somewhere else, too. As he moved studiously between my legs, I felt a euphoria that in recent months only intravenous medication had provided. It wasn’t a sexual pleasure exactly—I wasn’t there yet—but I had complete thoughts for what seemed like the first time in months. They sounded something like this: I am an adulteress. I am a cunt. My intestines are where my womb should go, but look at this, I am alive.

Glad I got that out of my system, I thought as I Ubered, dazed, the three blocks back to my parents’ house from Nick’s place. My mother was waiting up for me.

“LEAVE ME ALONE! I need some space to live!” I shrieked, as if she hadn’t been hovering above my prone form in the ICU less than a month earlier.

“What would you do if your daughter was wandering the streets with stitches still in her vagina?” she asked. And she had a great point.

“I fucked Nick,” I told her casually, as I closed my bedroom door.

“Good for fucking you,” she said, and she seemed like she meant it. “Honestly, at this point? Whatever helps.”

The next morning, I awoke in a panic, parched and uncomfortably sober, all rough edges. For the past year I’d been sleeping in layers, even on the hottest nights, but I was naked and face down and I felt like a detective coming upon my own body. I hoped that it had been a dream, like the relief of realizing I had only thought a bad thought. But I had done it. Not knowing who to call, I dialed my friend Randi, someone I’d always trusted to offer me feedback that allowed for the many shades of gray inherent to human morality.

“I had sex,” I told her, and for a second forgot to mention that it wasn’t with my boyfriend.

“That’s great, so you’re feeling better?”

“No, it was with my boyfriend from sixth grade.” I explained my logic—now that I knew what it was like to be desired, I’d be able to be present for my soulmate in a more total way. I honestly think this idea can be directly attributed to seeing The Bridges of Madison County in theaters as a child, a film in which Meryl Streep’s desperate housewife spends a week getting her back blown out by Clint Eastwood’s sexy itinerant photographer and then returns to a loveless marriage. Clint is so moved by their four-day affair that he bequeaths Meryl all of his worldly possessions. Eventually she dies, too, but not before leaving written instructions telling her children to scatter her ashes from the same bridge as him. Nothing odd about it.

Nick was sharing the cramped basement apartment with two guys named Chad, one gay and one straight. I would soon take to calling them Good Chad and Bad Chad (obviously the straight one was bad), but for the week before Jack and I broke up, I hoped that they somehow hadn’t recognized the fragile, thin-haired visitor in a massive hoodie. I hoped beyond hope I just looked like some emo train wreck he’d picked up in line at a methadone clinic.

The place was decorated like a college dorm belonging to three depressive members of a queer fraternity: rainbow flag, leather couch, blank wall with a few takeout menus taped up. Nick’s room was always freezing, and I wondered that first week what I had done in this life to deserve returning to the pre-professional world of beds without frames or fitted sheets. But I also wondered what I had done to deserve the chance to reach my hands across such a beautiful back, to put a cock like that in my mouth, to have a mouth like that whisper, “You have the best pussy, do you know that?” We were naked all week. We fucked so much that the quilt came off the bed, leaving me shivering in his sweat. We fucked at the end of the bed in the morning, him backlit so I could see his one, terrible tattoo: a melting clock. The pills made it easy to ignore the raw, angry knot that had once been my cervix, still stitched, screaming inside me every time I put out.

On the third night, my parents left town, and Nick met me at their place, where he went down on me while I watched the steady flames hiss in the electric fireplace. Afterward, we took a bath, washing each other’s hair at the same time, then fucked again on top of my parents’ quilt. He looked deep in my eyes as he moved over me and said: “You’re making me want to cut the brakes on your boyfriend’s car.”

Friday night, Jack got home from tour. We’d barely been speaking for the last two weeks, a stark contrast from the endless flow of “hi babies” and “love you monkeys” that used to punctuate even our crummiest days. I told him that I needed another night of rest at my parents’ place and I’d be home in the morning. I fell asleep at Nick’s after he fucked me to a Lana Del Rey song: But you get ready, you get all dressed up / To go nowhere in particular.

In the morning, I showered, dressed, and returned home to Jack, who was still sleeping. I crawled into bed and curled around his back like a shrimp. He nuzzled into me: “I love you.”

I cried without moving my face, without shaking, without making a sound. I tried to calm my sheer terror by telling myself I was finally home from a bad dream. I had fixed myself, proved I could be the freaky sexy lively young woman he fell in love with. I had exorcised the demon. In a way, I had fucked Nick for both our sakes, to make our house a home again. It would all be better now.

I fell asleep to the rhythm of Jack’s breathing, like I had been doing for almost six years.

When I woke up, he was in the kitchen. He said he was hungry, and we ordered breakfast, unpacking egg sandwiches and bacon strips from the diner where we had a charge account. But I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t pretend.

“I think we both know…we haven’t been making each other ha-a-appy,” I stuttered before sobs overtook me.

He nodded. We put our foreheads together and wept. In some fit of delusion, I asked if we could still go on dates.

“We can do whatever you want,” he said, the relief making us both euphoric with adoration. We told each other everything lovely that either of us might ever have wanted to hear.

“No matter what happens,” I said, “you will always be my first great love.”

“And you’ll be mine,” he wept. In the relief, he looked so young and silly, so wise and present, so exactly as I’d found him.