When you first feel it happening, you’ll notice it in a haphazard way. It’ll feel like casually pulling at a loose string on the sleeve of your favorite sweater only to look down and realize that you’ve undone half the stitching. You’ll have a dream that he cheats on you, multiple nights in a row, and you’ll feel angry with him, furious, although of course he isn’t here and he hasn’t been in weeks. You’ll believe that it’s true, that you have women’s intuition, you’ll stare at your phone and think about typing out the letters, slow and deliberate: Did you hook up with somebody since I left? You’ll remind yourself that it was just a dream. A month later it will still bother you. A year later, you’ll remember the dream more than you remember the sound of his voice.

Other small things will happen to you: he’ll text you less than he used to, he’ll sound angry on the phone and won’t explain why, he’ll say that he’s tired and doesn’t want to talk, he forgets to ask how your day is for weeks, he won’t remember critical facts about you. You will begin to feel exhausting, unwanted, neglected, hopeless, isolated—alone. You will begin to notice other things. Any man walking down the street with flowers becomes a vision of something beautiful, something possible. Every boy laughing on the phone as he passes you becomes a reminder of the phone call he never returned. Even a stranger brushing arms with you on the subway becomes a potential lover, someone who won’t ever be upset with you or tell you that you’re out of shape or make a joke at your expense.

You’ll fall into a new routine. It gets easier not to text him, not to call. You make jokes with him about it, you say, I’m getting better at not talking to you. You hope that it triggers something in him, you hope it makes him sad, you wish he would call you immediately and tell you frantically, maniacally, passionately, Please don’t ever stop talking to me, ever. He will not do this. He will say haha. He will not be laughing. You will want to crawl into a hole and never come out. A small worm of anger will begin to dig through the overturned soil of grief in your stomach.

You will start to obsess over it, the complete impossibility of it. You will never live there and he will never live here. You’re in different worlds, it will never work out, you’ll always feel this badly. It was a horrible idea to start with, and you wish you’d never met him, and you’ll feel that anger beginning to chew it’s way into your bloodstream, you’ll find yourself all over the city, in the line at the grocery store, or waiting in the elevator at work, or tripping on a crack in the sidewalk and all the while your mind while be playing something on loop: Why am I making all the effort, why doesn’t he care about me more, why doesn’t he want to talk to me, why am I in love with him and he isn’t in love with me, why are feelings allowed to be disproportional, isn’t this the worst pain in the world, if I always feel this way I’ll die, I will literally die.

And then one sentence will begin to take shape, you won’t dare to breathe it at first as it feels like treason. You will feel so betrayed by this sentence, since with it you will not only be Judas but also Jesus. You will be both the back and the blade. You will be the bee that dies after it stings. I can’t do this anymore.

You’ll start to say it under your breath when he really irritates you, you’ll chant it in your head when he doesn’t call, you’ll gasp it when you cry because the pain is too much, because the relationship is a bear trap and you are stuck in unbearable agony but you know that getting out of the beartrap isn’t the worst part, there is a pain worse than the jagged spikes digging into your muscles and bones, and you know it like you know your own name. Once you get out of the bear trap, you’ll never be the same. You’ll leave scarred, and bloody, and broken in more than one place. People will smell the pain on you for months; men will smell his insults lying thick on you like perfume.

But all the same you know you need to leave, and all the same you try to rationalize how you could work your way through it. You’ll practically beg him to talk on the phone, you’ll try for over a week to get his voice to carry over the miles between. You’ll start to remember that you’ve tried this before, with the articles about how to better communicate and the videos on how to survive a virtual relationship and the ways you already told him how you want him to treat you. He hasn’t responded to any of it. Everything he’s ever said is now running through your brain, creating a new narrative for him, creating a new version of him, he’s no longer the man you loved but he is a cruel stranger who has been water torturing you with text messages, a slow drip that you wait for and dread all at the same time.

Already you are folding him like egg whites into the batter of your life, he is just another asshole who mocked you like your father and made you work to feel appreciated like your mother. He is just another man in a long line of men who wiped his feet on your adoration. He is just another man, like all the others, who you allowed to treat you however he wanted, whenever he wanted, and you—not a victim, at least not anymore—laid down and spread your legs and begged for it.

Your opinion of him will seem to change in a week, but really it has been changing since the first time he made you feel like an unbearable burden, an elephantine weight on his shoulders, an obese imposition on his life. It has been changing since he screamed at you and you felt scared and then lied about it when he asked (he apologized but not excessively, he made you feel guilty because you called your mom, his shame is attached to you because you made him yell, you terrible ugly beast). It has been changing since the very beginning, when you were first trying to figure him out, and you had sex with him because he was losing interest and you wanted him to keep his eyes on you for a little bit longer. Now, all these months later, it doesn’t quite seem as worth as it as it did then. You told your friends at the time that it seemed cosmic, destiny, undeniable between the two of you. The only thing undeniable about it was that if you didn’t fuck him he wouldn’t text you back the next day. (One day you’ll forget this fact and painstakingly erase it from your mind. You will switch your memory to the romantic version, the one where you knew you’d love him. You will do this to survive. It will not be the truth.)

And then one day you will be standing in the white shower of your best friend’s New York City apartment, and he will finally respond to one of your texts, after reading them twelve hours prior. He will send you more texts than he has in a long time. He will not take any blame, he will make you feel as though you aren’t important, he isn’t interested, you’re acting out of line for loving him. He will say, I don’t know how to make any of this work with this amount of expectation. He will say, you don’t need to feel this bad. He will say, I don’t want to see you hurt. And you know that what he is really saying is that he doesn’t love you. He wants to carve you into whatever shape he wants. He knows that he is taking advantage but he wants to keep doing it, he wants you to know that he cares about keeping you on a leash, but like a foster pet he does not want to love you. He wants to drop you back off at the shelter after letting you take a short walk in the sun.

Then, you will feel something swelling inside of you, screaming, clawing at your throat and begging to get out. You will momentarily lose your mind, lose the ability of sight, of hearing, a delicious savory darkness that tastes like sesame seeds in your mouth. Then you’ll look down at your phone and see all the feelings you’ve been hiding for a month, feelings you wanted to share but couldn’t because he’d be dismissive and rude and borderline cruel in his complete lack of care. For the first time in a month or two, you’ll feel better.

You will cry so hard, harder than you ever have, so hard that it feels like throwing up. He will finally try to call you, and for the first time since you met him, you don’t want him to see you naked. You don’t want to hear his voice. You are kneeling there on the tile floor and you can barely breathe and you’re covered in snot and you don’t want him to see, you don’t want him to know that he’s torn your heart out of your body and laid it in front of you, bloody and sore and scowling.

The cat will be outside of the door mewling and you’ll let it in, shut the door to keep the heat. It will curl its tail around your calf and let you pet it with your tear-soaked hand. As soon as you feel a bit of love from this animal, lying flat on its back with a white silky tummy exposed, it turns and bites hard, indescribably hard, into your heel. You’ll find it funny at first, you trying to love something with teeth. Then you’ll feel an intestinal sadness that will have you leaning over the toilet it is so physical, so experienced, that you feel almost like you’re going to hurl up an organ and see it in the porcelain bowl, floating entrails glowing pink in the light.

You will decide to live your life, you will go on a long walk and talk to your mother and drink wine on the couch. You will not want to text him. You will want to erase him, although he’s all over you: in the shirt you wear to bed, the tote bag he bought for you at that concert, the perfume that he liked, the sketch of his city on your wall, the length of your hair because he said you should grow it out.

You will feel okay—for that one day. You should enjoy it. Drink a milkshake, dunk a taco in guacamole, feel the sun on your face. Because soon, you will relapse. You will want to take it all back. You will not be able to fathom being without him, not getting ignored by him, not begging for his attention. You love him, you’re in love with him, and letting that go suddenly seems impossible. It feels like he is both oxygen and gravity and without him you will float off choaking into the ether.

The despair will take over, you’ll rationalize everything you said, you’ll find elaborate ways to apologize (airline ticket, seventeen blow jobs, anal—finally, he’s been begging since he met you). You think that he’ll still want you, he’ll at the least still want to have sex with you, he’ll at least still want to be your friend, your acquaintance, someone you judge online? You cannot imagine losing him, but haven’t you already? Wasn’t he lost when you met him? Isn’t he still, now, living so far away and going to a new barber and forgetting to brush his teeth? Isn’t he someone else, wasn’t he always?

You will follow worrying anxious Alice down the rabbit hole and you will face new and unknown fears. The visions will plague you for months. You will not be able to comprehend the possibility of having sex with someone else, you will get nauseous at the thought of him inside of another woman, you will become terrified that you’ll never feel this way again, you’ll never be in love again, you’ll die horribly alone and he’ll get married to someone prettier and you’ll still be thinking about him, a hundred years later, rocking in a wooden chair and saying his name aloud to an empty room.

You will try to win him back. You might succeed, you might not. You might make more mistakes, repeat the cycle, wonder why you ever wanted it. You’ll find yourself sobbing in the bathroom, on the couch, in the middle of the night, at a child’s birthday party, in the pool during a summer two seasons later, looking at a photo that your phone cruelly shows you the day before your period. You will cry and you will laugh and you will be better—different, but better than the girl waiting six hours for him to text you back, only for him to respond in three letters or less.

You will have to make peace with certain memories; alter them if you have to.

You will have to face the image of yourself standing in that dirty kitchen because of an $800 airline ticket that cost over half a month’s rent, where he told you that you were a cunt. You were just doing the dishes, and the worst part of the memory is that you were so shocked, so confused by the statement, that you couldn’t even be offended. The soap ran off of your hands into the drain. You turned off the water. Did you call me a cunt? He did not apologize. He went to bed drunk. You cried as quietly as you could on sandy tile in a place that felt foreign to you. You felt scared, and you were all by yourself.

In reliving this memory you will envision all the things you could’ve done, the anger that should’ve poured out of you. You will ask yourself questions: why didn’t’ you go after him, why couldn’t you have at least defended yourself, didn’t you care about what he said? You will remember that you cared, deeply, about what he said. Even in the moment you realized that you loved him and you could forgive him, you wanted to forgive him, even then, in the moment, because you loved him so much that nothing else mattered. He was oxygen and gravity. You didn’t want to float too far away from him. You didn’t want to choke.

And you will have to wrap this memory in yellow tissue paper, like the kind you get on your birthday because it’s the happiest color, and you will have to lay it down in a part of yourself where you can only find it in the most desperate of times. You will unwrap it the next time you are in love, a warning of sorts. You cannot make a man oxygen and gravity again. You must breathe on your own.

In a year, two years, a decade—he will not be the love of your life, and you will not do anything for him, like you used to want to. You’ll date a nice man with a soft voice who doesn’t swear at you. He will text you back. He will make you feel wanted, so wanted that it hurts, because you remember how it feels to want someone that badly. He will live in the same city as you, and when he’s out of town, he’ll call you—just to hear your voice on the other end of the line.