Harvard Square is sort of an old stomping ground for feelings like this. Years ago I wandered there lost in my own heartbreak, and sure enough now I am doing it again. Before it was the end of my first relationship; now, it is my most recent, but I have apparently learned nothing in all that time because it hurts exactly the same. There is no feeling I have experienced that rivals that one in magnitude. There is a difference though: the first time I wandered there, I was only just learning to let go. It was my first experience of this strange thing called freedom, and now and then I took off in little hops like a bird from the nest. But still I clung to my past desperately and did not want to let go. Now my mistake is the reverse: I have cast off all ties with a haphazard arrogance, claiming to myself that I needed no one and nothing and that I was good at being on my own, but this feeling in the pit of my stomach proves to me that I was wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

At work I find myself preoccupied by dates. Dates are everywhere, written on paperwork I signed off on weeks ago and entered in the computer daily. But now it seems there is an invisible line dividing "before" and "after". Every time I type in a date from a week or so ago it feels like I am falling, and suddenly I am gasping like the wind has been knocked out of me, as though my heartstrings were laid along this line like tripwires. It is hard not to fall helplessly into such a recent past.

I cannot count the miles I have walked in the past few days trying to numb my overactive mind and emotions to everything that I don't know how to handle. I hypnotize myself with the repetitive motion of feet, walking endlessly through Brookline and Boston and Cambridge, shunning the public transportation which would only lead to physical stillness and mental activity. I now know exactly how long it would take me to walk to work should Boston ever have a transit strike (roughly an hour and a half), and I know how it feels to stand over the river in the very middle of the panorama of Boston's skyline, suddenly a part of the picture that I always look at from the T. But at the end of the day I always have to stop walking and go home, to sleep that does not rest me and wakefulness that is like a bad dream.

Things will get better. And if you need someone to talk to, you have my contact info.