She's chosen order - intense and rigid, reliable - because all around her, chaos reigns.

So she makes up the bed with careful, even movements, holding pillows at the seams. And she straightens the remotes on the coffee table because everything has its place and ought to be ‘just so.'

She lives in this state of quiet upheaval, her life a blur of wrong bad misinformed choices - the kind she now feels indebted to, which makes her hate them all the more.

It's like an animal in a cage, she thinks. Being her is like living life behind a fence, with people staring and pointing, wondering how she was stupid enough to get caught, when she should be living in the wild.

And she realizes she's let life consume her when really, shouldn't it be the other way around?

She knows it should and she hates herself, hates him and them and what it's done to her life.

She wonders why and how people hurt each other without meaning to, and how the people who fix it, ever find the desire to want to. She knows she should, but the motivation is gone, lost and buried, obliterated by years of being a second thought and a backward glance. Years of being left to fend for herself by the person she'd trusted to protect her and fight for her and choose her - but never has, not really.

And it makes her sad because he's a good guy. But it makes her angry because he's abandoned her to this life and this world and this loss. And she's not sure how a woman - how she - is supposed to forget being forgotten.

Especially when she knows there could be someone something sometime else. Better. No, not right away, before she's recovered some of the pieces of herself - but someday, when she takes a step without faltering, when she believes in possibility again.

The red light on her TIVO shines a reminder that something is recording and she flips on the TV to find Edward Ferrars professing his love to Elinor Dashwood. She sinks into the couch, knowing how it ends, but waiting with baited breath.

The music swells and there are tears - unbidden and surprising. This happens more than she'd like to admit when she's watching movies and TV where men, real and solid, are sick with love and desire. She watches them as they're driven to distraction, sacrificing pride and fortune. She watches them, studies the way they look at the girl that's rubbed them this way - raw.

And she wonders if anyone's ever looked at her that way. Thinks maybe, once, they did.

And she thinks that love like that - where men are men so they can have the love of a woman, where it's written on their faces - that love doesn't exist.

Somewhere inside she knows she's wrong, because she's seen it happen to people in her life, not just inside a Hollywood script. She's seen it happen to others, but not to her, so it's easier if it isn't true at all.

Just for a moment, when the credits start to roll, she hates Jane Austen. It's ridiculous and irrational and totally insane, but she still mutters, "Bitch," at her long dead favorite author and wipes her tears, sniffing and laughing because she feels just a little bit crazy. She wonders if she should start her yearly re-reading of Pride and Prejudice or pop it in the DVD player so she can see Colin Firth (who she believes IS the incarnation of Mr. Darcy) dive into the lake and try to wash Elizabeth Bennett off of his body and out of his mind.

She opts for self preservation and pads to the refrigerator, perusing the neatly formed rows of drinks, little monuments to the things she can control. She grabs a Blue Moon, wishing it were a Hoegaarden, but resigned to wanting what she can't have, settling for things she doesn't want.

Streetlights flicker through the blinds and she moves forward toward the window, pressing it open and wishing the quiet hum of night would come into her living room on a rush, in that same, indescribable way as the sun.

It doesn't and she sighs.

And she dreams of disappearing, Dear John note and all.

Maybe she'd write something poetic, like the lines to one of those songs about love and how it ends, how people let go of one another in that way she always thinks of when she thinks of him. She wonders if he ever notices the way those songs fit them like she does.

She plans her escape in her head. Where she'd go (to her friend, Ellen's, in Missouri) and what she'd do next (find some way, scrounge some money and make for New York or maybe hopefully eventually, Italy).

She thinks maybe he'd find her there - the other him, who looks at her, who loves her - and she'd finally have him without feeling guilty or stilted or lost.

Only free.

She's his best friend.

And she's annoying and stubborn and infuriating ... and he's totally in love with her in that blinding, white hot sort of way that's all encompassing and makes him want to crawl out of his skin.

He wonders how she doesn't know - thinks there are times he's sure she does - and he realizes he's doomed because some day he'll draw a line in the sand or curl up into a ball die and neither is bound to work in his favor.

She's taken over his life - owns him - and he hates himself for it.

But he can't help it.

Lately she's been giddy. With what he isn't sure, but she's skipping behind him and jinxing him and grasping his wrist with tiny, perfect fingers while they choose bands for her wedding. Wedding. He keeps that word tucked away somewhere with all the random Spanish words he remembers from high school, but usually has to look up in a phrasebook. He ignores the glint of gold on her left hand because otherwise it feels sort of like he thinks a supernova must when it collapses into a black hole.

And he thinks it's mean, all the ways she murders him.

But he's a glutton for punishment, and he knows he's rather die in the palm of her hand than hold on to someone ... less.

She smiles at him across poker chips and he takes his latest last deep breath.

She used to wish that someone watched her, knowing that he did. She could feel him, across a room, through a window, tingling in her spine.

And it dawns on her that in 10 years, she never felt Roy's eyes on her, not once, not that way.

But then again, she had a list of, "I Didn'ts" for Roy.

1. Trust.
2. Respect.
3. Depend on.
4. Feel protected by.
5. Feel cared for.
6. Expect anything from.

It's pitiful. And she laughs at herself for being cynical and jaded at 27, wonders when that flight came in and whether she only bought a one way ticket.

She envies people who don't ask questions, accepting their lot with dignity, but a whisper somewhere in her ear reminds her she used to be like that, and hated it more than she does this writhing and thrashing over everything.

And she's done a lot of writhing lately, because there's the life she once expected and the reality that came instead - swift and uninvited.

She battles them both.

One tugs at her imagination, the "might haves" and "could've beens" stunning her into silence.

Debilitated.

The other scratches and tears at her heart, her mind. Her faith in everything.

Most of all, him.

Not the one she left, the one that left her.

He was everything Roy wasn't. Did everything Roy didn't.

But she wasn't brave and one too many dreams deterred left them both a little vacant, a little broken.

So now he's a memory. Distant and faded, blurred like the lights of a cityscape in a nighttime photograph ... beautiful to look at, but smeared and strung together like something that will always move too fast to really capture, something that only stands still in the moment you're there with it - not after.

She rubs her eyes and sighs into nothing, wants to reach her hands toward the space in front of her and see if she can find a little place to breathe, thinks maybe she should send one of those cards to PostSecret - splash her heartache and turmoil and love onto a 4x6 piece of cardstock and share it with the world, give a piece of it away. Maybe send a piece to him.

Instead, she makes up the bed just so she can crawl back in, and promises herself that tomorrow - tomorrow when he's back - things will be different.