Eleven.

Carrie Bradshaw once narrated: "After a breakup, [New York City] becomes a deserted battlefield."

In the premiere episode of Sex and the City's second season, Carrie narrates: "After a breakup, certain streets, locations, even times of day are off-limits. The city becomes a deserted battlefield loaded with emotional landmines; you have to be very careful where you step, or you could be blown to pieces." She's a month out from her breakup with Big, who she had wanted to be the one, her one, after ten years in New York and five real relationships (one serious).

I hate to draw the parallels between her life and mine, but I suppose they draw themselves, my own private ley lines. My breakup with Henry came after ten years in New York and four real relationships (one serious), and I abjectly refused to go anywhere that I'd previously been with him.

My relationship with New York felt sullied. I'd opened up to him in the way that New Yorkers do, bringing him to all of my favorite spots and explaining to him why my preferred locales—the best shop for desserts, the best Sichuan restaurant, the best corner for people-watching, the best eatery for fried chicken, the best corner in a particular nightclub for making out—were superior to all the alternatives. After we broke up, all of these places felt tainted.

Throughout the episode, Carrie is dragged out of her stupor by her friends. She goes on a couple of dates, she meets a new guy, and she sees her ex-boyfriend in strangers everywhere…until she eventually does run into him in person. It's an accurate depiction of the social scene in New York, with vanishingly small distance between the lives of one and one's ex-partners—here, one needn't go knocking on doors looking for the devil, because he'll make an appearance regardless. The likelihood of accidentally bumping into one another is so probable that it's equally likely to mistake a stranger for someone you once knew as it is for that stranger to actually be the person you want to avoid most.

It felt deeply unfair. Although Henry had spent time in New York since his childhood, I always felt that my relationship with the city ran deeper than did his. He'd grown up being shipped between New York and Singapore, depending on where his parents lived at the time, and I'd assumed that that meant he had many more local haunts out of nostalgia, if not habit, than I did. But, he'd told me once, when I'd asked about his relationship with the city, that he didn't know it very well; he was too young back then to properly explore its depths, and he was only ever a visitor until after he graduated college and became a resident proper. In contrast, I had lived here throughout my most formative years and beyond, and I always had more of it to show him than he, someone who never left Manhattan, ever had to show me. So, I resented the taint of our breakup that seemed to corrode all of my corners of the city. It felt as though even the city itself was taking his side.

The truth is that the places themselves were still the same; I was just looking at them through grief-colored glasses. In my fragile state of mind, I desperately wanted to avoid every echo of what—or who—I'd lost. I wasn't ready to confront the ghosts of my past, reanimations of the life we had shared. I wasn't yet ready for those sad memories to transition into bittersweet nostalgia.

I saw Henry everywhere I went: Port Authority, Fiumicino Airport, rooftop networking events, apartment parties, somewhere in the crowd in a nightclub…and, like within the episode, half the time it wasn't him, but that meant that, half the time, it was. Once, upon exiting the A train on 42nd Street, I thought I saw him just a few paces ahead of me. As if I were deranged Carrie Bradshaw myself, I followed him, my heart racing all the while. I needed to know if it was him. I didn't know what I'd do if he saw me, if we were confronted with one another. I just needed to know.

Someone told me I needed to concede that, given our places within the social strata of New York, running into each other was inevitable; after all, it's his city too, they said. But, my conceit refused to concede anything to the man who'd broken my heart—much less to a man who never ventured into even Brooklyn—and I wasn't about to let him wrest my favorite city away from me, too.

My therapist asked if I'd consider that he was probably just as afraid of running into me. I didn't have a smarmy response. It was, all things considered, probably true.

At the end of that first episode, Carrie breaks things off with her new beau. The writers pull off a gentle fake-out: succumbing to her residual emotions, she calls and asks someone to meet her at "their spot" because she just can't do it anymore, she needs to talk to them. We're led to believe that it's Big she's hoping to meet; instead, it's her closest confidante, Miranda. Miranda, for her part and despite having earlier sworn off any further conversation with the girls about their men, their exes, because she hated to see Carrie so upset, because she wanted Carrie to not dwell, to move on, had also just had a run-in with an ex of her own; she softens her stance, and the two commiserate over french fries.

I came up with a plan of attack: I would retake all of my favorite parts of New York, all of which I'd known much longer than I'd ever known Henry, by begging and cajoling my friends to accompany me there so that I could create new memories. Although the mental scars were still fresh, I rationalized that they, like physical scars, could be turned over and eventually expelled from my body, from me, until nothing remained of the life I had had with him. I just needed to go outside.

I've realized recently that I can now credibly claim to have a memory associated with almost every block in Manhattan below 42nd Street. Years removed from the event, I concede that those memories do, unavoidably, include him. However, they're thankfully no longer the only ones I have. I, too, have begun to move on.