Gradually I am unpicking the claws of love, gently dislodging the suckers from my heart and soul. Love is a black hole with limits, a framing of life around the beloved, a centering as deadly as any other addiction, any other obsession, one that declines contrary evidence, excuses itself from social mores.

On Tuesday, I had nothing to do for eight hours at my internship. I surfed the net, read interesting articles, rearranged my email. I catalogued those from her, put them in a folder. Tucked away; relegated to history; filed, encyclopaedized and arranged in a rough chronology of falling together and falling apart. I re-read them all, with a faint sense of disatisfaction, anticlimax, like watching a show you loved as a child. Without the blinkers, they are normal, perhaps with leanings towards love at times, but countered by distinct leanings away as well, a lukewarm connection. Did I need her, need something so much at the time? Yes, I did. Farrago - my dream for three years- had finished; I had no real purpose, so I made her it, for a while, made her my dream. And like Farrago, when the dream pushed through the warm haze of sleep and fantasy to define its rigidities, elements of take and give, ranges and slopes of reality, closenesses and absences, I had to work hard to maintain the warmth of the dream in the face of neutral, nuanced reality.

My emotional exhaustion is lifting. I'm appreciating other people now, which is a step, I suppose. Other people now have the possibility of becoming wonderful.