He Spent a Year Paying a Doctor to Write Down a Fragile, Unstable Version of Me That Didn’t Exist — So When He Finally Set Me Aside, the Whole World Would Believe I’d Simply Come Apart on My Own

“Wake up soon, my love,” he murmured.

“We’ve got a wedding.” I kept my eyes shut until the door clicked shut behind him.

And then I opened them in the dark, dry-eyed, and understood that the woman who had loved him was already gone, and that whoever I was now had exactly one thing left to do.

The strangest grief, in the days that followed, was not grieving Christian.

It was grieving the five years — not the man, but the story, the whole edifice of memory I had lived inside and believed.