"Friend since March"

In about two months, we have seen each other seven times, exchanged approximately 13,000 FaceBook messages, had sex an appropriately mind-blowing number of times, and broken up once. Can you even call it a breakup?

I don't even know what to term the other it. Fling? Relationship? Love-type thing?

Tonight at dinner, Will told me that he thought we should just be friends, and stop sleeping together. Because he was leaving, and he'd just realised, and he needed - needed - to go. And that maybe this was something was going to stick around town for. Apparently the fact that I'd always been supportive of LA made it worse.

I don't want to cheapen how I felt. I was so embarrassed sitting there outside that gelato shop, watching my Bacio soften into soup, telling myself not to cry. Because love and affection are valid feelings, and I had them for him. Not a full-blown forever-relationship kind of love - but the kind that made me happy, all the same. Maybe he cared for me, maybe he was even falling in love a little. But y'know, he still made the call. And there ain't much I can do about that except comply.

I hate being left.

(It does - disappoint me that he wasn't brave enough to see it through. Not that it's cowardly to stop it now. It's just - I guess when I saw it was a good thing, I was determined to see it through to the end. And it's sad that it can't.)

And because I will forget otherwise, here is some of the last two months:

- Sweet days and hot nights at HB. Waking up in happiness. Awash in delight. Not leaving the house. Napping in a golden-lit tangle of limbs and contrasts and fresh skin. Looking up at him, after orgasm, through heavy eyes and tucking into his arms. The way he would lay a kiss on the top of my head, and hug tight. The slight floral scent of him, cut with clean sweat.

- His hands on my neck and my backside and my face and my hips and absolutely - absolutely taking.

- Stroking the inside of his forearm, with truth and measure.

- Conversations about everything and nothing. Music for days. Download sites that have everything. Waking up to a new song, or an email, or something that said, hey, I have been thinking about you, and what we talked about. Conversations where he remembered how much you liked something. and it made you feel nice that he cared.

- Walking blindfolded down George Street, in a silk kitty sleep mask. Eating so many cookies that you didn't want cookies for days after. Judging each cookie on three criteria, and writing them down at Papa E's office, in the shrieking room.

- The left-hand wall of the Parro apartment.

- Decaf English Breakfast, now stocked at Lenno.

- Well-cooked steak.

- Long drives with casual touching, and wearing his sweater.

How do I coin the phrase to set my soul apart? I don't know. I was happy - a simple, uncomplicated kind of happiness - one where I figured that if it worked, I'd try my hardest to make it work - long distance be damned - but now I am not. And that is a little bit of a heartbreak, I think.