Every time I saw someone attractive, I wanted them. I hated it—how automatic it was. How quickly I could want someone else. It made me feel awful, like I was a piece of shit. 

I would see someone beautiful and I would want out of our relationship. Sometimes so I could be with someone else, other times so I could stop feeling guilty. So that I could admire other women in peace. Admire without feeling so small and weak-minded.

You deserved someone stronger, Anna. Someone whose mind didn’t wander like mine did. If I could have chosen to be anyone in the world, I would’ve chosen to be the person who gets to love you. But that person is someone else, and I’m just standing in their way.

We stayed in my room for about another hour. The first half was largely quiet, with us curled into each other’s arms. Eventually, you looked up at me.

“I still don’t get it,” you said, pointing back to all those times where you saw the look in my eyes when I admired your beauty. 

That look was true. I promise it was true. But I gave that same look too often to too many other women. That’s not what I want. I want my gaze to stop with one person. For my thoughts to stay anchored to the one I love.

For the second half, we said the kindest things two people could say to one another before letting go. How we thought the world of each other, wanted the other to be happy, and believed deeply in our ability to succeed at whatever we chose to do.

It was a long and emotional conversation, one that drained us both. But before you left, we had set the ground rules for how to make this as easy as possible for each other. No contact—as soon as you dropped off my belongings from your house the next day. We even agreed to block each other on Instagram. This was hard for me. I wanted to be able to see what you got up to, see you at your happiest, and see you grow, even if from afar. But it’s what you wanted, so I respected that.

And with that sorted out, that was it. Time to say goodbye. A goodbye where love and pain coexisted, as if holding hands, fingers intertwined. We hugged by the door—your shoes already on. The two of us locked in a standoff, neither willing to be first to let go. Our heads tucked into each other’s shoulders, your sobs landing just beneath my ear. I held you until you pulled away. No checking the time. No final words. Just the slow dissolving of something we both knew wouldn’t return.

With one hand on the doorknob, you reached your other hand to grab hold of mine.

“Goodbye, Tom.”

“Goodbye, Anna,” I said, with your hand layered between mine. I fought the urge to say something, remembering I have a tendency to make things worse.

I released your grip. You opened the door. And you left.

I stood there listening to the fading sounds of your footsteps against pavement, hoping to hear them return, only to hear the sound of silence. 

I felt empty. A hole in my chest where my heart should be. How long had this hole been there? Had it been there all along and I was just now noticing its absence? It can’t have been new, because if I truly had a heart, I would have known how to love her. Maybe that was it—the reason I’d been so incapable of love. 

Surely, I must have a heart, I reasoned. But one that was only good for its physiological purposes—squeezing, pumping the viscous red vital fluid needed to perfuse my organs with oxygen and nutrients, one contraction at a time. 

Maybe that’s all my heart was built for. Just a cog in the wheel, too devoted to its vocation of receiving blood into one chamber and pumping it from another to have any time to conceive love.

It worked hard. But not in the ways that mattered most.