I didn’t explain to him that I wanted to eliminate him from my body, get rid of even those aspects of him that, out of a sort of positive bias or out of connivance, I hadn’t been able to see. I didn’t say to him that I wanted to escape the pull of his voice, of his verbal expressions, of his habits, of his feeling about the world. I wanted to be me. If that formulation even made sense. Or at least I wanted to see what remained of me, once he was removed.
