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love you anymore.”
    We both know she’s lying, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
    In time, she’ll be telling the truth.
    I watch myself turn and walk away. A life I will never know dies right before my eyes and takes a part of me along with it.
    Until now, I have never looked back.
    When I do, I feel shame, and worse…regret.
    “I could’ve saved you,” she tells me, smiling across time as if perhaps all is forgiven. “We could’ve been happy. If only you’d let us.”
    I want to reach across the bridge that separates us and take her hands in mine. I want to hold those hands to my face, to kiss them as I once did and tell her how sorry I am. I want to tell her that if I could do it all again I’d do it differently, although even knowing what I know now I can’t be sure that’s true. As always, Erin is the wiser. She slips away, drifting off into the same darkness that once again claims me.
    Swept into a dust devil of visions flashing before me in a rapid-fire montage, I feel the sorrow and regret, the terror and the loneliness falling away, peeling off like sheets of singed flesh torn from my body. And in its place is an overwhelming feeling of love and longing.
    A young man watches the most beautiful woman he has ever seen from across a college classroom, and she notices him too…Their first date, dinner and a movie—dinner at a local steakhouse that cost him his entire part-time paycheck, and a movie, Barry Levinson’s Diner , at a small theater not far from campus…the first touch, holding hands during the film…the first kiss, later that night as they walked hand-in-hand along the Boston Commons, and then again on the steps to her dorm…All the conversations and laughter that followed…The parties and the partying…the drugs and addictions that nearly overwhelmed them both but that were eventually overcome…The same couple just a few years older, on their wedding day, stronger, better…She moves down the aisle in a gorgeous gown and veil, so beautiful that she leaves him breathless even as he holds her trembling hand at the altar…You may kiss the bride…Their honeymoon in the Florida Keys…Coming home to their first apartment, a small and cramped space they would live in for the first five years of their marriage…All the years since slithering by like a slideshow, the laughter, the joys, the good times and the bad. I watch as Jenna and I make love then lay together in bed, quiet and still tangled together. I see the look in those soulful eyes and wonder how I ever could have lost her.
    I understand what I give up to be with her. But I also know that she saves me. With Jenna, the need to numb myself vanishes. I no longer feel neglected or alone, and my love for her is stronger, more mature than the love I’d felt for Erin. This is my wife, my best friend and partner. Jenna. Only Jenna, always Jenna…she is everything to me. I finish college, get my drinking under control and we both stop using drugs altogether. Because of her. I work hard and study even harder. Because of her. I succeed at the company, walking in as just another accountant on staff, and within ten years I am Assistant CFO. Because of her. And she is successful too, an executive at one of the largest financial investment companies in the country. Is it because of me? I want to believe that at least partly it is, but all I know for sure is that this woman helps change me from a tortured and unhappy boy into the man I am. Was…
    In return, I give her ever ounce of me, everything I have. Every bit of love and passion, friendship, loyalty and dedication in my being…and as I watch my life crumble before me like some cinematic dream, I realize that I have little left, because once you grant someone the power to give you what you need, to make you who you are, you also grant that person the power to take it all away.
    Love is a miracle cure and a deadly weapon. Do with it what you will.
    From darkness came light. I could hear my