The first night I brought you home to meet my roommate, she demurred and went out with the gentleman caller she was entertaining at the time.

Years later she would tell me she got drunk that night and told her date that she thought I was dating a serial killer.

I knew you were a rat bastard — because I myself was a conniving bitch.

Of course, nowadays I prefer the term ambitchous: I’m just willing to work fearlessly toward what I want in life. Wanting that made you “promising” but it made me “too intense” — it made me “a royal bitch.”

You were a rat bastard and I was a royal bitch.

We were great together.

I have no idea what compelled me to move in with you before we’d even had sex. I just felt comfortable around you, I felt like we’d been friends for a long time. I guess I’ll never know for sure if you felt the same, or if the nest you made for me was just to hide the bear trap in the puckerbrush.

You were the first person to ever see me in a state of dishabille. Before we’d moved in together, before we’d consummated the relationship, we spent one deliciously agonizing evening in my apartment. It was unbearably hot, as July sometimes is in New England.

I’d never let a man take my shirt off.

It was one o’clock in the morning and we both were feverish (even if the night air had cooled off, the humidity of the day behind us). We looked at each other for a long while without speaking, but so much was said.

Then, breathlessly you said, “I can’t believe I’m saying this but — I love you.”

I loved you too. Hopelessly.

I hadn’t even known you for a full lunar cycle, yet you were the sun, the moon and all the stars in the firmament to me.

I would lie awake at night, years later, waiting for you to come to bed and I would remember that night. I would remember how you seemed so astounded to love me. How I, too, couldn’t believe you did.

That anyone could.

Sometimes I wonder what — if not love — I had confused it for. The first year we spent together was the most sober for you and the least emotionally stable for me, yet the love seemed pure. Promising.

How did we go from that to you standing over my bed while I was recovering from surgery at your parent’s house (so you wouldn’t have to take care of me) telling me that since I couldn’t have sexual intercourse for six weeks you thought you were entitled to have sex with other women?

I swallowed hard, my stitches tugging as I shuddered a sigh.

I cited monogamy.

You told me that wasn’t a reason.

That I was wrong for expecting you to be faithful.

I was the one with the problem. It wasn’t your fault. Why should you have to go without? You hadn’t made me sick. You hadn’t tangled up my organs. You hadn’t made me hemorrhage. Why should you have to suffer too?

My female friends always ask me why I didn’t leave you then and there.

The answer was quite simple:

I hadn’t healed enough to be able to get downstairs.

Your parents looked after me as I recouperated.

They took your side.

Your father brought me soup.

Your mother changed my bandages.

They pursed their lips and shook their heads a lot.

That summer was sultry, but we orbited one another with a blue chill.

You got alcohol poisoning. The nurses in the ED thought it was cute.

The last six months we were together, I don’t think you were sober for a single twenty-four hour period. I tried to love you harder.

I was in a lot of pain. I let you have sex with me because that’s what you do with the man you’re going to marry. I stopped worrying about how much I was bleeding. I took pills. I had my uterus dilated, stuck in an IUD even though I was probably infertile anyway. I needed to be assured I would never, ever have any child of yours.

Deep down I knew I would not want a child like you. That’s why I started to not just be averse to having sex with you, but afraid.

I was afraid of you.

You cried a lot. You whined. The only thing that made you more unattractive than alcohol was marijuana, for which your capacity was unparalleled even amongst your group of stoner friends.

One day when you were not home, they came over to see me. They stood in our bedroom as I lay sick in bed and told me they were sorry you were treating me like shit. That you didn’t deserve me.

That I didn’t deserve to be treated that way.

I didn’t defend you. I agreed with them.

But I stayed.

(After I left you I had sex with one of them, just once. He was so kind.)

I would say that the icy night in December when you showed up high on pills to your mother’s birthday, you broke her heart, but I realize now you’d shattered it long ago, far before you’d even met me.

She had no pieces left that were big enough for you to break, so instead, you just continued to grind her heart down into a fine powder.

I let you drive home even though I knew you were high.

I think I was hoping you’d crash and kill us both so that I’d never have to admit how much I had grown to loathe you.

How much I’d come to despise myself.

Your dealer overdosed at our apartment during a violent snowstorm. I had just received my basic life support certification. When I tried to get you to help me put him in the car, to brave the storm to get him to the hospital, you screamed at me.

You told me to stop acting like I knew everything. That you knew what was best. That you knew he would be okay if he could just throw up whatever he’d taken. That he was still breathing, maybe it was shallow but he was alive.

I stood outside in the dark, in the snow, my face blistering from the cold. I began to cry — and I cried for every single rotten thing you’d said to me, but really, I cried because I realized the horrible truth about you. I screamed into the night,

“Are you willing to let this person die just so you don’t have to admit that you’re wrong?”

You dragged him back into the house — and that was my answer.

The next morning we did take him. He was in terrible shape. You walked into the ER, high as a kite yourself, and started talking to the doctors — the doctors that I worked with — like you were the one in charge.

You were an arrogant piece of shit — and I was horrified.

We both slept for two days after that and hardly spoke.

There was nothing to say.

But still, I held you in bed at night. I needed your warmth.

The following Monday when I went to work and that person’s chart came across my desk, I lost it. My boss lost it at me losing it. She sent me home.

You were in bed, asleep.

I told you I was leaving.

You cried and begged me not to.

I knew you meant it. I told you if you went to rehab, I’d stay.

When I kissed you goodbye I knew I wasn’t going to miss you — I already did, for a year. We had taken you several states away to a place where you could face your demons.

I went home to face mine.

I sat in your parent’s dark living room. Your mother held me for a long time.

I had done what they may never do: admit that I couldn’t save you.

For the next three months there were visits. Phone calls. Letters. We spent Christmas without you — but you were able to place a call. We passed the phone around while you screamed into it that you were miserable.

I took sleeping pills and slept you off, only to wake up a day later to your mother worrying over me, thinking I’d died of a broken heart.

As she stood above me, the gritty residue of her heart poured onto me.

I coughed and a plume of my own came up to meet it.

When we came to visit you in March, I still thought I could fall in love with you again. I was hopeful. I didn’t want to walk away from you because I truly did — and do — believe that people can change.

Only if they want to, though.

I was still hopeful about you, and in love with you, and devoted to you, when I left you. The person in charge of your care told me that I had to go.

For my safety. For my life.

We had walked into his office together hand in hand.

That morning we’d stolen a kiss over breakfast.

We’d giggled in one of your meetings.

You’d rested your hand on my leg in church.

I loved you when I left you.

A year ago I sat in the airport in a city I’d never been to. I tipped the cab driver $50 because I had openly sobbed the entire ride from the hotel to the terminal. He looked at me with disbelief and asked me why I was being so generous. I told him that I just wanted him to have a better day than I was having. He said, Bless you, ma’am.

I really did think that I was going to spend the rest of my life with you.

Even when you disappointed me.

Even when it hurt. Even when you made me so angry I broke dishes.

You were a rat bastard. I was a royal bitch.

We were great together.

But apart, we’ll thrive.