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Why do we love? It gives us hope of escaping a solitary existence.
Eddie, in Three Dollars

The last time I saw her was one year, one month and two days after the time before. Whereas the earlier of the two occasions left me in considerable confusion (though perhaps it shouldn't have) and consequently, a proportionate measure of hope, the more recent encounter left less room for disputing the desirability, if not imperative, of moving on.

To describe the intervening period as "a blur" is at once an understatement and a misstatement. A flurry of feelings, longing, hurt, helplessness, regret, self-pity, ...,­ ceaselessly collided into one another to create flavours of poignancy none novel and all unpalatable, even to a lover of the melodramatic such as myself. Yet at the same time I was steered by a stern clarity of direction which only in hindsight, not a moment sooner, could be properly attributed to a profound lack of perspective and of insight alike. When I look back on 2006 I don't understand how I got anything else done.

Hope may be all that it is cracked up to be, but false hope merely lengthens the days to delay the facing of the very truth which one had set out to stall indefinitely by clinging to whatever falsity one's fancy takes. I am told that a common manifestation of obsession is the repeated setting by one of "tests" which it is impossible for one's object of obsession to fail. For more than three hundred and ninety-seven days I indulged in wishful thinking and futile speculation when the truth is, has been, as blindingly obvious as I had tried to remain blind to it, that I was always going to be on my own amidst the flurry, and that whatever I thought I had to give did not, could never, justify what I had done - far less what I was hoping for.

As I sat beside her on the guest bed in the living room of her apartment (a bed which, had it been actually offered to me rather than in a roundabout or, more plausibly, imagined sort of way, I almost certainly would've been unable to decline despite the absurdity of the scenario in which we would've found ourselves: she making room for me in her living room after all these months of having no room for me in her life) for most of my ninety-minute interstate visit, I did not, contrary to my secret fears, find myself burning with desire or being tortured by all-the-things-I-wanted-to-say-but-couldn't. And what vestige I felt of the way we were in the days before the mess, whatever comfort this afforded, I knew even before I finally brought myself to say goodnight that that, the warmth of nostalgia and nothing more, would mark the perimeter of our acquaintance from now on. Something's been lost and I've nothing to show for it.

I don't agree that we cannot choose who we love. We choose them the same way we choose everything else - university courses, careers, places of residence, holiday destinations, friends - that is, with little knowledge and boundless optimism, weighing up all our options (including that of choosing none); but it is a choice nonetheless. And if I were proved wrong and the so-called choices illusory, we can at least choose how we love. For more than a year I chose to pine for someone single-mindedly, stubbornly, fruitlessly, when I should have, could have, loved everyone, including myself, including that someone, a little more. By this choice I was left the poorer, and lost a part of myself without which I wouldn't be me. Until recently I'd had no cause to doubt my capacity to love.

But I did love her. I do so. Whatever bruised ego, selfishness and inexcusable stupidity have tainted my love along the way, it is there in the knot in my throat, at the tip of my tongue, in the corner of my eye, beneath the newer sediments of memory which have already begun to accumulate. It reminds me by the tightness in my chest, the sweat in my palms and the panic in my voice whenever I am reminded of her - never mind that I'm the only one to know any of this - that a part of my heart is hers forever. By renouncing my ...­ fixation, I do not mean to reject all that it was; I couldn't if I tried. But there is nothing quite like loving someone who just wants to polite.

It would have taken next to nothing to not only shake, but annihilate, my resolve - even as I was making my way out of her apartment that last time; even now. Lucky for me (though it will be another while before I can honestly see it this way) next-to-nothing is, always has been, too much to ask. I'd be lying if I said that it matters to me no more what she knows and how she feels about all this. But I am smacked with the larger truth that for every bit that I continue to allow it to matter, I am that much further away from reclaiming that in me which is worthy of being loved, and of loving another.

Two weeks ago tonight I said goodbye.