I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

It had been almost three months, but I still couldn’t help looking in his medicine cabinet.

I wouldn’t say that I went into his bathroom with that as my sole intention–I really did have to pee!–but as I was washing my hands an internal debate raged. “Do it!” someone on my left shoulder said. “No! Don’t be so pathetic!” someone on my right shoulder replied, disgusted. Feeling helpless, I listened to my left and popped open the medicine cabinet as I ran the tap, hoping the gushing water would overpower the noise of my snooping.

Inside there were a string of condoms that had come from a box he and I had bought when we were together. I know this because they were the same kind that I have buried deep in the back of my top drawer. “He is using these to have sex with someone else,” my right shoulder whispered. “So are you!” retorted my left.

I only had the cabinet open for approximately three seconds. Like a gruesome roadside crash, I had to look, but I couldn’t look for very long. I had to look, but I didn’t want to see.

On the second shelf there was a blue toothbrush: his. On the third shelf lay a pink one. My first thought was that it was mine, that–in a fit of sadness and nostalgia–he had brought my toothbrush with him across the country, from one cold city to another. It looked just like the one I’d left in his bathroom cabinet in New York. It was pink–the same color as mine. It could even have been the same brand. Of course I realized, as I quietly pressed closed the cabinet door, that it wasn’t mine–just like the blue flip flops next to his bed weren’t mine, or the shampoo in the bathtub. Just like he himself wasn’t, at least not anymore.

It wasn’t sadness that I felt, just the feeling that overwhelms you when you miss someone or something without consequence. It feels like a hunger, like a thing out of your control.

“People are always falling in love with the idea of other people,” I wrote to a friend once. “What do you mean?” he asked. I guess I mean that some people only love you when you are at your best. They love the way you laugh at parties, the confidence you feign in bed, the small print of your business cards. They learn to ignore your messy morning hair, the slightly whining timbre of your voice. It is the things we ignore that come back suddenly and flood our bodies with despair in the middle of the night. Somehow, the things that we ignore almost always end up being the things that destroy us.

Before I saw the toothbrush I feared I was still in love with the idea of him, something that I had taken and molded into the ideal while we weren’t speaking. I took his memory in my hands and, like a ball of clay, sculpted it into a shape that disregarded the things he had done to hurt me, all graceful angles, no sharpness.

It is easy to only remember the light when the dark has been gone for so long. And since the dark disappeared awhile ago, I realize now–happily!–that the light is gone too. The idea of him isn’t around to crawl up my spine and sleep on my neck anymore. What remains now is the truth of what happened to us, of how it began and ended–or at least as close to the truth as someone destroyed by the flood can hope to get.

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