Love the one youre with

I considered saying more, confiding all the gory details, but could feel myself shutting down, becoming defensive and closed.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Do you want to talk about it?'

I shook my head and said, 'I don't know… It's really… complicated.'

And it felt complicated in the way that all breakups feel complicated when you're embroiled in them. While in cruel actuality, most are really quite simple. And it goes something like this: one person falls out of love-or simply realizes that he was never really in love in the first place, wishing he could take back those words, that promise from the heart. Looking back, I can see that that was likely the case with Leo and me- the simplest explanation is often the right one, my mother used to tell me. But at the time, I didn't believe that could be the case.

Instead, I hoped for what all girls hope for in my situation: that he'd change his mind, come to his senses, realize what he had in me, discover that I couldn't be replaced. I kept thinking, even saying aloud to Margot and my sister, 'Nobody will love him like I love him,' which I now realize is far from a selling point to a man. To anyone.

Even worse, I kept replaying in my head that dreadful saying that starts, 'If you love something, set it free.' I pictured the laminated poster-size version of it that my sister hung in her bedroom after a particularly scarring high school breakup. The words were written in purple, sympathy card-style script, complete with a soaring eagle and mountaintop view. I remember thinking that no eagle in the world is going to willingly fly back to captivity.

'Damn straight, he was never yours,' I always wanted to tell Suzanne.

But now. Now Leo was that eagle. And I was certain that he would be the one exception to the rule. The one bird who would return.

So I stoically waited, desperately clinging to the notion that ours was only a trial separation. And, incredibly enough, my feelings became even more intense post-breakup. If I was obsessed with Leo when I was with him, I was drowning in him afterward. He occupied every minute of my day as I became a cliche of the brokenhearted woman. I tortured myself with his old answering machine messages and sad, bitter songs like Sinead O'Connor's 'The Last Day of Our Acquaintance.' I wallowed in bed and burst into tears at the most random, inopportune moments. I wrote and revised long letters to him that I knew I would never send. I completely neglected my personal appearance (unless you count candlelit pity parties in the bathtub) and vacillated between eating nothing and gorging on ice cream, Doritos, and the ultimate cliche, Twinkies.

I couldn't even escape Leo during sleep. For the first time in my life, I remembered vivid details of my dreams, dreams that were always about him, us. Sometimes they were bad dreams of near-misses and poor communication and his cold, slow withdrawal. But sometimes they were amazing dreams-Leo and I wiling away the hours in smoky cafes or making hard, sweaty love in his bed-and in some ways, those happy dreams were more agonizing than the bad. I'd awaken, and for a few, fleeting seconds, I'd actually believe that we were back together again. That the breakup was the dream and that I had only to open my eyes and find him right there beside me. Instead, grim reality would set in again. Leo was moving on to a new life without me, and I was alone.

After weeks, nearly months of this sort of melodrama, Margot intervened. It was a Saturday, early evening, and she had just failed in about her sixth straight weekend attempt to get me to go out with her. She emerged from her bedroom, looking radiant in a funky, indigo sweater, hip-hugging jeans, and pointy- toed, black boots. She had curled her usually stick-straight hair and applied a shimmering, perfumed powder along her collarbone.

'You look awesome,' I told her. 'Where are you going?'

'Out with the girls,' she said. 'Sure you don't want to come?'

'I'm sure,' I said. 'Pretty in Pink is on tonight.'

She crossed her arms and pursed her lips. 'I don't know what you're so mopey about. You were never really in love with him,' she finally said, as matter-of-factly as if she were stating that the capital of Pennsylvania is Harrisburg.

I gave her a look like she was crazy. Of course I was in love with Leo. Wasn't my profound grief proof of a grand love?

She continued, 'You were only in lust. The two are often confused.'

'It was love,' I said, thinking that the lust was only one component of our love. 'I still love him. I will always love him.'

'No,' she said. 'You were only in love with the idea of love. And now you are in love with the idea of a broken heart… You're acting like an angst-ridden adolescent.'

It was the ultimate slam to a woman in her twenties.

'You're wrong,' I said, gripping my icy tub of pralines 'n' cream.

She sighed and gave me a maternal stare. 'Haven't you ever heard that true love is supposed to make you a better person? Uplift you?'

'I was a better person with Leo,' I said, excavating a praline. 'He did uplift me.'

She shook her head and started to preach, her Southern accent kicking in more, the way it always does when she's adamant about something. 'Actually you sucked when you were with Leo… He made you needy, spineless, insecure, and one-dimensional. It was like I didn't even know you anymore. You weren't the same person with him. I think the whole relationship was… unhealthy.'

'You were just jealous,' I said softly, thinking that I wasn't sure if I meant she was jealous she didn't have a Leo-or was jealous that he had replaced her as the most important person in my life. Both theories seemed plausible despite the fact that she, as always, had a boyfriend of her own.

'Jealous. I don't think so, Ellen.' She sounded so convincing, so borderline amused with the mere thought of envying what I had with Leo, that I felt my face growing hot as I retreated on this point and just said again, 'He did too make me better.'

It was the closest we had ever come to anything resembling a fight, and despite my rising fury, I was also nervous, unable to look her in the eye.

'Oh yeah?' she said. 'Well, if that's true, Ellen, then show me one good photo you took when you were with him. Show me how he inspired you. Prove me wrong.'

I put down my ice cream, right onto her April issue of Town amp; Country, and marched over to my roll-top desk in the corner of our living room. I pulled open a drawer, grabbed a manila envelope filled with photographs, and dramatically fanned them onto our coffee table.

She picked them up, flipping through them with the same detached expression with which one shuffles a deck of cards during rounds of mindless solitaire.

'Ellen,' she finally said. 'These pictures… They just aren't… that good.'

'What do you mean they aren't that good?' I said, looking over her shoulder as she examined the photos of Leo. Leo laughing. Leo looking contemplative. Leo asleep on a Sunday morning, curled up next to his dog, Jasper. I felt a pang of longing for the surly boxer I never liked much to begin with.

'Okay,' she finally said, stopping at one of Leo that I took the summer before. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt that says 'Atari' and is reclined on a bench in Central Park, staring directly into the camera, directly at me. Only his eyes are smiling.

'Take this one, for example,' she said. 'The lighting is good. Nice composition, I guess, but it's… just sort of boring. He's good-looking and all, but so what? There's nothing else going on here but a reasonably cute guy on a bench… It's… he's trying way too hard.'

I gasped, at least on the inside. This insult was, perhaps, even worse than likening me to a lovesick teenager. 'Trying too hard?' I said, now full-fledged pissed.

'I'm not saying you're trying too hard,' she said. 'But he definitely is. Just look at his expression… He's affected, smug, self-aware. He knows he's being photographed. He knows he's being worshipped. He's all, 'Look at my sultry stare.' Seriously, Ellen. I hate this photo. Every single shot you took in the year before Leo is more interesting than this one.'

She tossed the photograph back onto the coffee table, and it landed face up. I looked at it, and could almost, almost see what she was saying. I felt a stab of something close to shame, similar to the