Once in a while, I smell Clive on my skin and it stops my day. It's a train crossing; I wait to pass. Eventually the lights stop flashing, the barriers lift. I keep moving.

Seeing his face after months was as immediate as a pointed gun.

I'm everything you thought I would never be. I'm the woman you thought I could never amount to. I have all the things you said I couldn't get and did all the things you said I couldn't do. Yeah, you're somebody's somebody, and while you're at a stand still I'm crawling to the top. You destroyed me, and now you motivate me,and inspire me, to BE better, to DO better...and to WANT better.

I was clinging to all that had been and, in an ideal world, all that we had hoped for. He, he wanted out.

Love is like a tide. When it's in, everything looks beautiful and inviting. Only when love recedes can you see the debris beneath the surface - the old bottles, the rusty prams, the sewage pipes, the bloated cats and dogs weighted down to drown. The man I had once loved so passionately I now saw as weak, gutted like a fish.

The person who wants out of the relationship always gets her way.