It is perhaps easier to justify the end of a relationship—both to yourself and to others—when there is a definite, tangible cause, no matter how painful. But it is harder to grasp the gradual evaporation of love, a loss so slow and subtle as to be barely detectable, until it is fully gone. Now she feels like a passenger on a sleeper train who awakens and draws back the curtains, only to find an unfamiliar landscape that had been there all along. She cannot pull the curtains closed again.
