I am breaking up, with you.

I am wearing grey long underwear with tiny purple and pink flowers printed on them. I’ve had them since high school, and they’ve worn out and ripped in back, in a long line-turned-to-a-hole down my thigh. No one will ever see them, though, so I let them stay in my drawer and save me every time I need to wash the thin silk ones I got to take to China.

I’ve rolled them down today, in a two-inch flat swath that stretches from hip bone to bone. I am aware of the stretch, aware of how I look with bikini-cut underwear underneath them, the thin straps crossing my sides alone, over that bone that juts out more than ever. I’ve lost a lot of weight.

The awareness is yours, though, created by you. It’s an awareness of you more than of myself.

That was all you wanted to create – like God, blindly indifferent to the unwakened desires of his creatures before he made them – as though I’d wanted to know just this, my own power. As though I’d wanted an education.

The new self-consciousness – not insecurity, the opposite – is a kind of knowledge. It must be why scholars focus so myopically on whether Adam and Eve had sex in the garden, before the Fall.

“Maybe they did, but they had no lust,” some speculate.

But that doesn’t make sense. I had no lust.

My desire was, as the curse says, “for my husband.” The whole person. Not a part to use.

My desire was for the work that happens between two people, between midnight movies, between kissing and groping. I kept waiting for it, my hands tentative and untouching until I could grasp what wasn't there.

I wanted all of it, you see, especially the unfilled spaces, especially the interstitial reflections on how to be a better person – I wanted you as a reason to be a better person.

I am glad I stopped before I realized I was the only one wanting this. Slightly before, but I’m glad I did. You had been dividing me.

I should have known earlier, by the way we discussed my body as a separate entity. I should have known by how often you told me you weren’t paying attention to what I said or wrote, or the way we laughed at things that were mine and serious.

I couldn’t know earlier, though. I could not have understood the possible divorce between part and part. I was trying, always, to be a whole person and could not see the severing between me and me as it happened.

I get it now. I see myself as a series of parts, as an intoxicating array of them, as a set of qualities I can use to force the between-questions, to force men to do the work with me – to love me.

I could manipulate you, or anyone, in pieces.

This is never what I wanted. I wanted the work of being together – of being a together person.

All I have now is this empty, unconsoling reward.