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"Manzana" he would call me. That was the nick-name he would call me in private. No one knew that I was his "apple" - that name was ours. It belongs in a private treasure chest where all the countless moments we shared alone belong. Falling in love creates those indestructible chests which are filled with private memories, with manzanas. We carry the chests when we think of those that we have loved. The more moments shared, the heavier the chests. And as we set forth on days when we are no longer near those whom we have loved, the chests lay resting amongst the troves of all of our other life experiences. Manzana is in there and it will always be there because I can't forget how hearing it made me feel. Now, to some, it may sound weird to call someone you love an apple but it wasn't what he called me that mattered, it was how he said it. He said it in moments when we were happy. And we were happy.

I never thought that this moment in my journey would come. The moment where I was actually "okay" again. The moment where I could authentically feel at peace with the loss of my relationship with a man I loved so dearly. I went through the stages of any loss and in the thick of it, I swore there was no way I could climb out of the sadness I felt. I went through my bouts of maddening anger, exhausting attempts to bargain or plea for a different outcome, waves of drowning sadness, and moments where thinking of manzanas were, in essence, intolerable. Crying, over-rationalizing, hypothesizing, replaying old memories, blaming, avoiding, denying, wanting, missing...I felt it all and far too intensely. The man I had spent one-fifth of my life with was no longer a part of my everyday experience. No longer there to curl next to during cold nights or during Jack Nicholson's portrayal in The Shining. No longer available to call when I felt lost with how to deal with relatives at Thanksgiving or when I just wanted to blab with my best friend. Everything slipped away and it felt as if a part of me was rotting away into thin air.

I told other people that I couldn't love again and wouldn't love again. That I didn't have it in me to hold another person in the same light which I had held the man who gave me manzanas. No one understood the rule I had set up for myself. The rule was that you only love once and you do it whole heartedly, no matter what the shape of the relationship is or how wrong a fit it may be. And I was sticking to it. For a long time, unbeknownst to my ex, I was

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