Jude thought we should be like a gift to each other, but I longed to be essential. That was love, I decided, as our intimacy changed and deepened over the course of the year. Not being able to do without. Wanting—that was just desire, fluid and changeable as the tide. Need was real love, the truest kind I’d known, born as it is out of what we lack, and that was how I felt about Jude back then—that he completed me, we completed each other, as in the old myth about the origin of love. And if I was essential, the other half of whatever he was, then he could never abandon me.
