Staring into her tearful eyes, Alice felt Dana’s trembling hands move from her shoulder blades, up to her face, and then finally smoothing out her disheveled hair and tucking a stubborn piece behind her ear. 

“I gotta go,” Dana reasoned, although she still found it difficult to pull away and relinquish all physical contact. “I have to go.” She wasn’t sure if she heard Alice utter the word “no” in an attempt to protest, but she did see the writer slowly shake her head in grim disbelief. She knew the only thing left to do was leave, but her hands somehow managed to roam along Alice’s frame, unable to break their final contact. Finally, Dana tore herself away and cried that she had to go once more. She knew that this last statement was more to convince herself that she had to go than anything else, but the words still seemed hollow and insincere as she heard them leaving of her mouth.

So with every ounce of strength and conviction she had left in her body, Dana grabbed her bag off the couch and walked out of Alice’s apartment. And as painful as it was to keep going, she refused to allow herself to look back and see the broken woman standing behind her. As she quietly shut Alice’s front door, she wavered between bolting down the hall to get as far away as she possibly could, and running back inside, taking Alice in her arms and vowing to never leave again. And while nearly every part of her couldn’t imagine a life without Alice in it, she knew that if she didn’t leave now, she’d lose the writer just the same.

Alice was barely able to watch her lover walk out the door. But nothing the tennis player did was as excruciating to Alice as the deafening sound of Dana opening the door and then closing it behind her. It was in that exact second that Alice realized she was completely alone. She called out Dana’s name after the stark realization hit her, but it was to no avail. She was gone and no amount of begging or pleading would bring her back. She followed her out into the hall, wanting to run ahead and stop her. But the right words, something Alice had always taken for granted as being within her grasp, were eluding her now. So she stood in the doorway, tears streaming mercilessly down her face, and watched as her soul mate walked away forever. Suddenly standing upright became too arduous a task and a feeble Alice doubled over in pain, crying harder than she had ever cried before. She finally sunk to the floor, banging her head against the doorframe and closing her eyes tightly shut. She sat there for what could have been 5 minutes or 5 hours, her mind reeling, yet unable to form one coherent thought.

As her mind raced, she alternated between absolute shock and complete acceptance as to why it was over. One minute she refused to believe this was really happening to them, and the next she was convinced that this was just the inevitable realized. That’s what people did to Alice, they left her. And knowing that harsh reality made Alice all the more adept at pushing people away before they had the chance to leave by their own accord. Maybe that’s what she had been doing with Dana. Maybe Dana didn’t know that Alice wanted her to stay. She had to make Dana realize that she didn’t want her to go and that she wanted to work on this. She couldn’t live without Dana and Dana needed to know that.

And then she remembered that for months Dana promised she wouldn’t leave. And Alice couldn’t help but get angry when she thought about how crazy Dana would make her out to be for fearing the worst. ‘Well, Dana,’ Alice thought, ‘looks like I was right all along.’ Alice laughed bitterly at herself considering that being right never hurt so much. She bit her bottom lip in a vain attempt at stopping the tears and lifted herself up off the ground to search for the nearest bottle of pills and Jack Daniels that she could find.

When back inside the apartment, she washed down the small fistful of Vicodin with a few shots of whiskey, and climbed into her bed praying to wake up tomorrow with this whole night being just a dream—a horrible, horrible dream that she and Dana could laugh at together later.

Except, Alice woke up the next day and realized it was no dream at all. Despite all of Dana’s assurances over the past few months to the contrary, she was gone, shattering the writer’s world into a million pieces. And Alice, despondent and heartbroken, was unsure if she even wanted to try to put it back together.