I remember I had an odd feeling of déjà vu as I looked blankly at our conversation. Perhaps not déjà vu, per se, but rather a sense of familiarity with lost causes. Not to be too melodramatic, but this entire day of interaction took a steep decline from bad to worse and in no time at all I believe we had hit a point of no return.

Thinking back further, the day may just have been a symptom of a larger ailment in our relationship overall. I was very enamored with her, and it seemed that she was with me as well, but then something appeared to change. It was unspoken, but there was a discernible shift from well-balanced to a weight being shifted further on me -- like I was striving for her affection, where before she had freely given it.

What I did not know was what I must have done to make that happen. She was very far beyond me in many ways -- I realized that and I know she did as well -- but it never seemed to bother her until that point. I hadn't said anything too off-putting, I didn't say more or less than I should have. I could not think of what I could have done to upset her as much as I apparently had. As all these thoughts raced through my mind, I just stared blankly at the screen in my hand.

I didn’t know what to say. When someone you are deeply infatuated with and who knows more about you than most anyone uses your deepest insecurities against you, what do you do? When they tell you to seek out other people to have an interest in but you don't know why, what then? What if you didn't know whether you caused it? What do you say to them? “I'm sorry,” and “I didn't mean to,” don't work very well when someone says they no longer want you to confide in them.

At times, I have found that I have trouble communicating. I do not read into things properly, I gloss over subtleties or see them where they are not. She was rather entertained by this, and so a joke that we shared was that when she would say “Okay,” I would always read too much into it. I decided to take this lost cause as a prime opportunity to return the favor, and to this day the last sentence I ever said to her was simply “Okay.” The rest of that summer day was a bit colder than most for me.

Love has damaged me and I don't know if that's a bad thing. I have been burned and betrayed in love so many times that it has made me reconsider the definition of that deceptively simple term. But in having been damaged by love, I have realized that what I may have thought of as love was not in fact that but a cheap simulacrum. And knowing this, I will know in the future when truly I have found love.