Taking all of this into account, I hope to guide her toward a fourth option. What she is telling me, in effect, is: I need to end this, but I don’t want to. What I can see, and she has not yet grasped, is that the thing she is really afraid to lose is not him—it’s the part of herself that he awakened. “You think you had a relationship with Truck Man,” I tell her. “Actually, you had an intimate encounter with yourself, mediated by him.”
