I didn’t write any fiction the whole year (or so) we dated. I can only write love poems, was what I told my friend Ben. I can only journal about him. I’m a student of prompts; I need someone to grease my hands in order to get the ball rolling. Love, however, is impromptu, and with this being my first introduction to the abstraction, I found myself lost in the unreality of my reality.

I wrote to figure out what was happening to me, to us, so I could contain it and understand it. I wrote simply; prosaic and non-lyrical. As Joan Didion says in “On Keeping a Notebook,” I was trying to “remember what it was to be me,” and I had never known who I was in love.

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The first break-up essay ever written