After Dave's body turned on itself, when the cancer started growing fast and his weight dropped what seemed like twenty pounds in a day and when even his eyelashes--long and delicate as a girl's--fell out, it seemed hard for him to hide anything anymore. I guess that's how we measure people sometimes--we stack them up by their ability to keep their secrets close.

Dave was preoccupied, all kinds of busy and healing--I know. Chemo takes a lot out of a person, that's what everyone says. So when it came time for him to meet me on Saturday mornings or Thursday nights or any of our usual times, when he didn't have the energy to lie to his wife anymore and could no longer back up the lines he'd previously used with her (honey, I have to pick up the dry cleaning then I'm just stopping at the office, we have a late meeting tonight, it's a business trip, strictly a business trip, you never have any fun on those damn things, do you baby?), well I guess it's cruel but I didn't much know what to do with him anymore.

I know you're thinking that's not how people talk when they talk about love. But people in general don't much know what love is really like, when it comes down to it. They think it's all soft and sweet and pure, a bouquet of flowers, a warm summer day, a sunrise and a sunset. People think it fits into a box or can be as clean and neat as one of those poems, the ones where you count the syllables and at the end, it's perfect, perfection, a tiny, fixed work of art. No one talks about falling in love with the wrong person, falling for someone whose life has already been counted out into a tiny, fixed work of art.