Five.

Legendary philosopher Wendy Williams once postulated that one gets over someone by getting under someone else.

How much of hunger is actually thirst? In the aftermath of my breakup, I wanted one thing but knew intuitively that I needed, in reality, another.

By the time that July arrived, I was an emotional mess. I’d spent the prior three months trying desperately to avoid anything and everything that would remind me of my breakup, which, naturally, meant that it was all I could think about. I counted down each date until the sixth arrived, trying and failing to divorce my birth date from the date of our separation. When the sixth of each month became the seventh, my tension would give way to temporary relief, only to return as the subsequent sixth encroached.

Henry haunted my dreams. In some of them, he was back in my apartment. He sat on the edge of my bed in my tiny studio apartment and turned to look at me, no longer avoiding my gaze. When I apologized to him, over and over, he listened. We laid it all out, acknowledged our mistakes, and agreed to try again. He forgave me.

In my other dreams, our breakup had never even happened. It was a concept that didn’t exist, that didn’t even cross my mind. Instead, our partnership, ever facile, simply went on.

In each of them, it was his vulnerable, fully realized self that had finally emerged. It was the pair of round frame glasses that he only ever wore in his most private moments, it was the sharp jawline that beautifully structured his face, it was the tender smile that he reserved only for me. It was the way he had looked at me on our most fateful day that I could never, will never, forget.

Those dreams were the worst. I would wake up from them slightly disoriented with my pillows stained wet from tears that I didn’t even know I was crying whilst asleep. Every morning, my heart broke all over again.

I didn’t want to, couldn’t, be on my own. I begged people to occupy my time. Friends flew in to visit me, old flames recounted their experiences dating me, internet strangers read tarot for me. Renee, my adoptive elder sister and former coworker, told me that I wasn’t myself, that I wasn’t the steadfastly confident individual she knew me to be, that she wanted to put her hands on my shoulders and shake some sense back into me. At her wits’ end, all she could do was buy me dinner.

She was right. I wasn’t myself—I was deeply lonely. I had come to, somewhat vexingly, shape so much of my life around Henry in the one year we shared, much more than I had done with any man I’d ever dated before, despite those relationships having been two- or even three-fold in length. But, resultant of years of endless internal debate, that’s an easy contradiction to resolve: he was the one I had wanted the most. Absent his presence, which he had so willingly chosen to remove, I slotted person after person into the niche he’d formerly occupied.

The loneliness I felt wasn’t just the malaise of being single once more; by then, I’d been through plenty of breakups, and returning to singledom wasn’t difficult to navigate. Rather—and this is how I found myself explaining it, over and over—I felt that I had been forcibly ripped in two. I was dealing with both the acute loss of my other half and the pained knowledge that I would never get it back.

There’s a joke somewhere online that Wendy Williams often made about getting over someone: to do so, one gets underneath someone else. I had nothing to lose, so I tried that, too. I hooked up with men just to feel the ghost of intimacy.

Unsurprisingly, it almost never worked out.

I’d spent much of my twenties interrogating my relationship with sex. The pressure men put on themselves to participate in sex is well-documented; it seemed that everyone was doing it, and I wanted to fit in—I desired and wanted to be desired. I wanted to be like everybody else. But, it was something I only consistently did with my long-term partners (who had taken four-fifths of that decade), which I theorized engendered the mental strings I tied between sex and intimacy. Therefore, despite wanting to engage in what I assumed to be average human behavior, I couldn’t. I couldn’t divorce intercourse from emotional intimacy.

I wondered for a very long time whether there was something wrong with me. With all the introspection I’d done and all the (demisexuality) theory I’d read, why did I—do I—not feel comfortable hooking up? I knew what it was, I knew what it could be, I knew what I could do. I still felt compelled to go fishing, to test whether my puzzle pieces fit with anyone else’s, but I didn’t have fun. I didn’t like it. Do I pathologize myself? So be it. Simply put, my most intimate self is locked away within me, expressed only with partners I can trust deeply.

Given that context in which I existed, without the life partner I had so recently lost, I no longer had a willing recipient for all my affection.

In the rare instances that my libido did return, I decided to try. In one, for example, I drove to Tustin to meet up with a guy, telling myself while on my way there that I was going to have a good time. I did, when I finally made it into his apartment—just not with him. Instead, I let myself get sidetracked petting his dogs, apologizing profusely for disappointing him and wasting his time. After I left, I sat in an In-N-Out Burger parking lot attempting to console myself with a cheeseburger and fries. In my car, I faced the reality that I was thirsty, not hungry: I didn’t want sex—I wanted intimacy.

In the life I imagined I would have had with Henry, I would have known him. He would have told me in much greater detail about his split upbringing between Asia and America, like mine in reverse. He would have taught me more of his mother tongue as we explored his hometown, where he would have shown me all his favorite places as well as the ones that no longer exist due to the passage of time. I was after the deepest partnership possible, wherein we could communicate with only eye contact, forged over a lifetime of trust and communication. And, in return, he would have come to know me, too.