Two years ago on this date, I was in St. Paul, for a visit with the person that was scheduled to lead up to the day before Thanksgiving, something like a four or five day visit. She and I had been back and forth quite a bit, since the previous July, when we last saw each other, and had almost broken things off completely a few times. Yet we scheduled this visit, maybe impulsively, maybe out of desperation, who knows. I arrived in the already dark evening on the 15th. By the time I got to my kind of dreary Airbnb near Snelling Avenue, around the corner from The Turf Club (where the person and I had seen Robyn Hitchcock the previous April), it was not possible for the person to get away and visit. The person had to work the entire next day, but finally stopped by where I was staying, in the late evening. By that time, I had bought Christmas lights and put them up, and some candles, and roses, and tried to make the weird little apartment festive and romantic. I had also been to the store and gotten hot chocolate. I had this whole romantic fantasy going on, of the person and I spending wintry, cozy hours together. When she did stop by, she was distant, and behaving coldly. She didn't seem impressed by my efforts at romance. I had bought her some custom sexy lingerie that I gifted her, and she dismissed it as silly, and said "I had a training bra like that when I was 14." She gave me a couple of presents, including two heart-shaped coasters that I have since almost thrown away about a thousand times but still have. Anyway, I could tell that something was just completely off. It's interesting, trying to tell this story, and how embarrassing it is that I was so passively present for her, in spite of her noncommittal distance and lack of enthusiasm. Looking back, it feels as if I was in a trance of some kind. Nothing felt present or real. We lay in the bed for a little while and finally she admitted that she just wanted to break up. This was extremely difficult for me,of course, since there had been no prior conversation along these lines while scheduling the visit or leading up to it. But I respected her decision, of course, and wondered, should I stay for the next four days as planned or just bail? I didn't know. On the one hand, going to all the trouble and expense of visiting, only to be broken up with, had me bewildered and angry. On the other hand, being broken up with kindly and in person seemed preferable to other possibilities. Her way of expressing it was basically "I will always love you, you are the love of my life, but I simply can't manage doing this anymore, I just can't do it." This seemed perfectly reasonable to me, in spite of also being heartbreaking. The next day, I took down all the romantic holiday lights, threw the flowers away, and wondered what to do. She messaged saying she wanted to see me later. Okay. She visited, and was warm and affectionate, and we ended up making out again. It was strained though. Something dark and heavy had settled in, no matter what we tried to do. We two were totally out of control and bewildered. The sadness was thick and heavy. The next day, we were supposed to get together in the evening, but she said that her replacement at her job was, at first, late, and then just didn't show up, and she ended up having to work until 11 pm. This experience was yet another in a series of her ongoing, rather full life making it impossible for us to see each other. I suddenly realized that I was more of an inconvenience and imposition than a welcome visitor. It hit me pretty hard, this blazing dose of reality. I also started to have a paranoid intuition/suspicion that the reason she couldn't stop by that day was not because she was working late, but because she was actually having *another affair*, and these intrusive thoughts were deeply disturbing. I decided to stop by her house after 11, to catch her on the way in, to say goodbye in person, and to confirm that she really had worked late, and that I would change my flight the next day and leave on Monday, three days early. I should mention that my left eye had been having serious issues for a couple of weeks prior to this, and I assumed it was just posterior vitreous detachment. However, sometime around this visit, I think the retina actually started to detach, and this only added to the overall sense of weird gloom and doom. I had even looked into maybe trying to get to an eye doctor in St. Paul, but, when I decided to leave early, I decided also to wait until I got back to Tempe. Anyway, I waited until around 11 and drove my rental car over to her house and waited down the block a bit. She pulled up at about 11:20 and I almost got out to flag her down but then I suddenly realized it might startle her, and that I was being crazy. My own behavior was basically at stalking levels. I didn't want to say goodbye to her in front of her actual house. I was not exactly sane. I watched her get out of her car and hustle across the front lawn of her home, in the 15 degree bitter cold. She went in through the front door, and vanished, and that's the last time I ever saw her. I told her the next day that I had stopped by, but realized it would have been silly to say goodbye, and that I felt out of control and sort of crazy. I also told her I had canceled the rest of the trip, and was flying out the next early morning. It was revealing that she wasn't disappointed. In fact, she was relieved. I was happy for that, truthfully, as it confirmed that I had made the right decision. Southwest Airlines was thrilled to trade my seat to Monday of Thanksgiving week. I got up at 4:30 a.m., drove my rental car to the airport, turned it in, and flew out of St, Paul at 6 a.m. Southwest gave me $130 in credit for a future ticket. They probably made good Thanksgiving money off my Wednesday reservation. In spite of how dreary and awful this visit was, and how taken for granted and dismissed I felt, and how the utterly unavoidable reality of being an afterthought in the person's life when I had made her the center of mine, and how I was paranoid that she was fucking another guy, she and I reconnected a couple of weeks later and made arrangements for me to visit Santa Fe over the winter holiday, while she was going to be there *with her husband*, visiting her family. This is some measure of how crazy both of us were. However, the day before I was supposed to drive up to Santa Fe, I had an emergency eye appointment due to a torn and detached retina, and it was necessary to have gas injected into my eye, to press the retina up against the back of the eye. One of the side effects of the gas was that I could not change elevation. If I did, I risked serious, permanent blindness in my left eye, due to the pressure change. So the December visit had to be canceled. It's for the best, as it would have been quite mad indeed, trying to meet up with her while her husband was being the good son in law or brother in law. Neither one of us was thinking very clearly, obviously. Understatement. I spent the winter break face down, due to the issues with my retina. I had the gas injected on a Friday, and then had retinal re-attachment surgery on the following Monday. The entire winter break was spent nursing my way back to some semblance of a re-attached retina. While the person was in Santa Fe, she was completely distant from me, and had no response to my plight of eye surgery, being face down, etc. It was odd how suddenly, completely cold she was toward me. I mentioned as much and her response was to break up again. "I do not have the psychic resilience to keep doing this," she said. It was the winter solstice. "It figures this would happen on the darkest day of the year," she texted. There were a few brief exchanges via text. The last thing she texted was "Stay cozy," which I still find utterly hilarious. I was face down for days on end post eye surgery, almost 100% alone, and "stay cozy" was the closest she could get to showing any tenderness. Again, in spite of all of this, and after a grueling January that involved the retina detaching again, and another gas injection, and then another surgery that involved an oil injection, the person and I set up a plan for me to visit her in February, over Valentine's Day, no less. We impulsively tumbled into this plan on a Thursday and Friday, and I bought a plane ticket and reserved a place to stay. By Monday, I could tell she had regretted this idea. I told her I could tell the whole thing had been a mistake. She admitted as much. I told her I would cancel everything. In fact, I waited two weeks before I canceled my flight and rental. The funds from that ticket eventually ended up getting applied to my flight back to Phoenix, just last July, to rent a truck and move here to LA. So much has happened in the intervening two years since this long, slow disintegration of the affair. But I will not lie: these memories burn like magnesium ribbon, as if it all happened a week ago. It feels exactly right somehow that the last time I saw her, I was invisible, and she was walking into her house, into the life she already had. It seems perfect somehow that a crazy idea of a visit when she was actually traveling with her husband got canceled because my retina detached. It seems perfect that our very last weird and impulsive attempt to see each other was over Valentine's Day, and it was just not going to happen. In retrospect, how much the whole thing meant to both of us, yet how bewildering and out of control the entire experience was, and how much pain I caused myself due to my confusion over my feelings versus my actions, well, it's all still pretty overwhelming (obviously, for anyone who has been reading along). Some friends of mine get exasperated by how long it is taking me to "get over" all of this, and I get exasperated too, sometimes. But every time I get a reminder of the plot line and the accompanying emotions, I can be a little more patient with myself as far as "getting over it" is concerned. Now, the person is pregnant with child number 3, expecting in February. Oddly, I feel nothing but compassion around this whole reality. Who am I to try to tell someone else's story? I tumbled into an already existing life, and was a reason for someone to risk that entire life for a while, and then I wasn't. I was the reason this person's life was better, for a short time. Then I was the reason her life was worse, heavier, sadder, more complicated, fraught with guilt and remorse. Then I wasn't. It's weird to have been all of these things. I was a secret. It's weird to have agreed to that. Meanwhile what I recall is the ice on the ground, some light snow falling, one of the nights I was there in November 2018, the trees bare, Minnehaha Falls starting to completely freeze over as they do every year, the days very short. My own high hopes, my own bewilderment, my own gradually more and more enforced loneliness and sense of self betrayal.