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those newfangled sweatpants with the cuffs on the ankles and are otherwise insufferable.
    The last time we’d really spoken to each other was November 2001—three months after we’d officially broken up—when I screamed at him on a quiet block in Brooklyn Heights, outside what had been our shared home. The woman he was now dating stood next to him, aghast. A random passerby, a man, told me to be quiet. I yelled at him to fuck off. I punched Pete over and over again in the shoulder, because he deserved it. I also threw my makeup bag in the street. I’m less sure of why I did that. Whatever the reason, it was a bad idea, because the thing you forget as an adult having a tantrum is that unlike when you were two and having a tantrum, no one else is going to pick up the shit you throw on the ground. I watched my boyfriend’s new girlfriend, the blonde in a houndstooth J.Crew coat, scurry to the safety of the opposite corner, possibly afraid for her life. She should have been. I was an angry monster who wanted to eat them both. I told him I would never forgive him, that he had lost me forever, and that I would never ever speak to him again.
    So now I am deciding whether what I said that night will continue to be true.
    Just before we’d discussed taking a break, I had started reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Love . I remember thinking maybe it wasn’t the best idea to be delving into Raymond Carver when I was already feeling blue. Just looking at the paperback’s cover, a Hopper-inspired illustration of a lady in the world’s bleakest purple shirt sitting alone on the edge of a bed, was enough to make me pull the blankets over my head. Still, I’d been experiencing a growing sense of shame about my inability to read anything but Us Weekly since college, and I felt like I had to stick with it.
    After Pete and I agreed that we needed time apart to “take a break,” I decamped to my parents’ place in Manhattan. The Carver book, along with most of my other possessions, stayed behind. I packed an atrocity of a red gym bag with whatever items of Gap clothing felt necessary at the time. As I rode the subway across the river, I felt certain I would be back soon. I was so very naive. I had never gone through a breakup before. I didn’t know that genially agreeing to “take a break” is, in most cases, just the emotional amuse-bouche to having your heart shattered like a lightbulb being thrown under the wheel of a school bus. Which is, of course, what happened.
    Three months later, post-shattering, my friend Kat agreed to drive me back to Brooklyn in her beat-up green car to pick up the rest of my stuff. The plan was: She would double-park and wait while I went upstairs and quickly collected my possessions, such as they were: a Groucho Marx poster, my clothes, miscellaneous tchotchkes, and my books. I would then come downstairs, we’d cram my stuff into the hatchback, drive back to my parents’ house, order Thai food, and then she’d watch me cry in my childhood bedroom. It seemed like an airtight plan.
    Pete and I weren’t speaking, but he had emailed me to tell me he was going to be away for a few weeks. He was off in Europe, supposedly with a friend, but I’d heard through the grapevine that she was there too. It was a mystery to me how this person, this person who’d been my person for six years, had turned his feelings for me off like a faucet and was now, miraculously, tragically, fucking someone else. As I walked into our former shared home, it dawned on me that the place must be loaded with clues as to how this had occurred. Just as I stupidly thought romantic “breaks” led to happy reunions, I was also too young to know that purposely rifling through your ex’s apartment to find the detritus of his sex life with his new girlfriend is one of the dumbest things you can do in this life. In two minutes, I would acquire that knowledge. But at the moment I walked in the door, I was still an