I have felt so much grief at the end of love that all my love has started to feel like the beginning of grief. I can’t stop talking about what will happen if my best friend dies. I am decimated by the loss of things that aren’t even gone yet. I am so full of the people I love—I have let so much of myself be made by them—that I can tell, with clinical specificity, precisely how little of me there could be if they were gone. The more firmly and reliably entrenched they are in my life, the more the fear persists. I, too, am defined by absence.