The last time I saw him, he was twisted up in my bedsheets. It was early, my bedroom was dark and I was looking for something to wear to work. I settled on a plain black dress, started to make some coffee and sat on the edge of the mattress. I whispered his name a few times. He looked at me as if he was still dreaming, as if he didn’t recognize me. I’d grown accustomed to those looks.

It was how he had looked at me the night before, after I asked him what was wrong, a question I asked him a lot because something was always wrong. He told me, “I don’t think this is working.” And when he said that, it didn’t hurt me anymore, not the way I expected it to. I already knew it wasn’t working. I just didn’t want to admit it. So, instead of agreeing with him, I told him we could make it work and we could be okay. Before he tried to respond, I pasted my lips to his, clamping my eyelids shut, putting my hands on his skin, trying to distract him. I told myself that I could make things okay. We could go back to where we began.

We met on campus on a sunny autumn day when the leaves were just starting to turn crisp oranges, yellows and reds. He was a playwriting student. I was a fiction writing student. We swapped numbers under the veil of meeting up and sharing our writing, and I came over to his apartment one Saturday night in September. We traded pages, reading them on the couch in silence, and following up with vague comments about how much we liked the other’s writing. We shared our first kiss sitting on the floor of his room, after we talked about all the books on his bookshelf and after he had played me one of his favorite songs on his computer. He thanked me after I kissed him, telling me he didn’t think he was courageous enough to do it first. When he turned off his bedroom lights that first night I told him that I was afraid, that these things scare me. “I don’t want to get hurt,” I said.

Two months before I met him, my heart had been squashed by Matt, the boy who wrote me sonnets and played me rare Bruce Springsteen EPs on vinyl and crafted songs for me on his guitar. He had blue eyes and untamed eyebrows. Matt caught me with his words, adored me intently and quickly, and then he was gone. He wouldn’t pick up my phone calls. He wouldn’t see me anymore. Two months later and I was still trying to figure out what happened. At the time I’d convinced myself that I would never love anyone as hard and as fast as I loved Matt. Because loving him was like jumping down a waterfall and being caught up in the rapids, then smashed against the rocks. By the time I found the riverbank, I could hardly remember my name.

I was in a new bed, with a new boy, but I still remembered Matt. “These things never end well,” I told him that first night, as the Christmas lights strung around his room glittered. “I don’t wanna get my heart broken or anything.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t know how to break hearts.”

I didn’t believe him, but I pretended that I did. It’s easier to give in to a new beginning, even if you can see how it will end.

•

We had a few good weeks. We spent days sitting out on my fire escape, drinking coffee, and reading each other our favorite poems. We played each other songs on the guitar and sat quietly together doing homework, reading books or writing. He was soft and small and his skin was perfect, luminescent. I was obsessed with it, so smooth and blemish-free, unlike mine. I’d read him the stories I was working on and he’d send me the plays he was writing. We cooked vegan dinners together and exchanged mix CDs and wrote each other letters that we’d hand off to one another in person.

But that was it. One day, I woke up and saw that we had already drifted toward the end. It was October in Chicago and a cold front had moved in, so suddenly it made me forget about what summer felt like at all. We were in the height of our semesters, both stressing out about school and jobs and internships. We had opposite schedules and so the time we spent together meant that we were sacrificing sleep or neglecting an assignment.

I’d arrive on his doorstep to find him in the midst of an anxiety attack. His skin, which I thought was so perfect and seamless, would look drained and stretched. He had just started a new prescription of Zoloft and he told me he didn’t feel right, he didn’t feel good. He was a mess; his bones twitched, he smoked cigarettes, one right after the other, while I sat beside him and watched. He didn’t look at me. His eyes roamed around, looking at the walls or the floor or his fingernails, but never me. He was depressed, he told me, anxious, lost, confused. When he was alone, he’d claw at his skin with staples until he bled, and the next time I was with him I’d uncover the cuts as we climbed into bed, small red streaks on the outsides of his thighs. “I had a bad night last night,” he’d explain, and it would make me want to pull him closer to me, because I understood that kind of hopelessness.

I thought I could fix his sadness, thought I could plug up the leaks and make him smile. And when I failed, I wondered what I was doing wrong. I wanted to be a magician, to wave my wand and whisper a spell and remove the boulders from inside him. But I couldn’t. All I wanted was a response from him. Maybe I could get him to smile or laugh or to just look at me and tell me he thought I was pretty. I felt inadequate and insecure, doubting my abilities, doubting his care for me. The further he pulled away, the harder I tried to bring him back. I wanted to help him, to take care of him.

I forgot about me. I forgot about taking care of me.

Even then, in the moment, I could see that my self-esteem was suffering. I started having my own anxiety attacks; I grew angry, sad, frail. By all accounts, I should have ended things. I mean, I didn’t know him very well or for very long. We weren’t like officially “boyfriend-girlfriend” dating. We didn’t have years, or even months, of history behind us to rationalize working things out. We were squatting in a crumbling building and it was only a matter of time before the whole thing came down.

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even though I knew that destruction was inevitable. I was heavy and unhappy, but I couldn’t stop trying.

So I waited.

•

He always kept his clothes on when he went to sleep, which I never understood. He said it was more comfortable that way. He would rather fall asleep in his jeans. I preferred to sleep naked, but I didn’t want to be so vulnerable when he was so hidden, so I’d get dressed too and we’d sleep together, our clothed bodies touching every so often. But that last night I was with him, we didn’t touch at all. He got dressed and told me he was tired and he feel asleep within minutes. The side effects from his medication left him tired and sedated and sleepy, which made him the only person I’ve ever met who could fall asleep faster than I could. I stayed up for a few hours, listening to his soft snoring, trying to think of solutions. Even at the very end, I still wanted to fix it.

In the morning, when the coffee was finished, I poured a mug for him and left it on my bedside table, for whenever he woke up. I said goodbye and kissed his lips and I left him in my bedroom.

Five days later, he ended things over the phone, telling me that he hated himself, he hated his life, and he didn’t care about me. “So, that’s it?” I asked him. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s it.”

And just like that, all of the heartbreak I’d been hiding from caught up to me. For the past three years, maybe more, I had preoccupied myself with someone else. I wanted to be a good girlfriend, rather than be good to myself. I fished around for others’ affections, using boys like stepping stones, bouncing from one to the next with only a few weeks in between them. Each time, things got stickier, the disappointment snowballed and I lost sight of myself even more. So when he broke up with me over the phone, it wasn’t just the end of the past two months, but the past few years. And there wasn’t a stepping stone to leap to.

I realized quickly that it wasn’t even about him. Not really. I didn’t really care about him. I had convinced myself I cared for him because I was thirsty for adoration and I didn’t know how to supply it myself. Before I met him I was licking my wounds and looking for shelter. He was my Band-Aid. But when I pulled it off, the wound hadn’t healed at all.

I bought packs of cigarettes and smoked them in my bedroom, using the lit end of one to light another. My clothes stank of smoke. I cried all day, as soon as I woke up, in the shower, on the train platform, in the bathroom during class break, on the phone with my parents. I was an hourglass and the grains of sand leaked out of me, one by one. My best friend didn’t know what to do. None of my friends did. Some tried. Some stayed away, as if heartbreak was contagious. I stopped eating. I drank too much coffee. I wrote. I slept. I Googled “How to Overcome Heartbreak.” I stared at the wall. I got drunk. I watched TV for hours. I wore the same clothes for days. I was ghosted, sedated, out of touch. I felt alone. I was alone.

•

The dawn comes gradually. It can start whenever you decide, whenever you acknowledge that you have the power to decide. I realized it begins with the simpler things in your control. You start to celebrate the small victories, take it one step at a time–breathe in, breathe out–because looking at the big picture makes you dizzy.

I took baby steps. I stopped buying cigarettes and, instead, started bumming them off people on the sidewalk, but that made me feel guilty, so I stopped doing that too. I got my first tattoo. I started doing yoga in the morning. I repeated positive affirmations to myself every morning. I wrote them on scraps of paper and hung them on the walls all over our apartment. I started to come home from night class and had dance parties in the living room with my best friend, blasting music and dancing until I was out of breath. I became a gym member. I went to my first Reiki session and my friend Neale told me about chakras and energy and self-healing, and I started to feel grounded, started to feel like I was getting to know myself again, and maybe I could like who I was.

There’s something comforting about reaching the bottom. When you look around and see you’re on your own, you begin to realize that maybe loneliness doesn’t have to be so lonely. Maybe it’s okay. Maybe it’s the only way you’ll really get to learn who you are, take care of that person and love that person as hard as you can. It’s there, at the bottom, when you realize the only way out is up.