What's hardest about being the one who was left: There's a lot of fear left over. Fear of risk. Fear of hurt. Fear of being left again.

Over everything, coloring everything, is that fear of ending up back in that place — the place that comes before the leaving. That place where you love, where you want, where you're willing to try and he isn't. That place where you're simply waiting — on the side, in the back — hoping for a smile, a word, some time. Hoping he'll remember that you're the one he chose. Hoping that he'll choose you again.

There's nothing worse than wanting someone who doesn't want you back.

So when the person you're with now, the person you've come to love — despite trying not to, despite fighting it — dithers, wavers, backs off, it's that worst feeling all over again.

It's not fair, really. It's not as though the other party isn't entitled to his own fears. It's not as though it's something that can't be worked through. It's not as though this isn't a normal part of a figuring out a relationship.

But even knowing all that, even knowing that you shouldn't look for parallels, shouldn't panic, shouldn't run and hide, nothing, nothing, nothing makes you feel as terrified and unhappy and wishing to god you had never let yourself love someone else as thinking — even for a day, even for an hour — that someone else, someone again, doesn't think you're enough.  Doesn't want you enough.

And maybe that's lot of pressure to put on someone new. Maybe it's a lot of pressure on yourself — to constantly try not to fear, not to worry, not to expect the worst.

But all you want is to be wanted. All you want is someone who wakes up, sees you, and thinks that's the most wonderful thing in the world. That seems like so much to ask. It also seems like so little.

"I chose to be a workaholic to support my family. Then she chose not to be my family because I was a workaholic."

This was one of the postcards on PostSecret recently. The fact that I'm wondering if Jake sent it is unnerving. Don't I believe, haven't I always believed, that he was the one, really, that made this decision? That he was the one who didn't want me?

Jake and I don't really talk, and he's a little miffed that I won't be "friends" with him. In the middle of the summer, in the middle of the Cohabitation Experiment, in the middle of me trying to figure out why I was having such a hard time, I got an email from Jake saying that I should stop being mad at him. "It's not," he wrote, "like you were so great to be married to."

So, this made me think. All anyone knows is my side. All my friends with their righteous indignation, all those who excuse how difficult I make things, how panicky and skittish I am — it's not like any of them were there.

What if I am terrible to live with? What if I am ungrateful and unsupportive and demanding and all those things Jake used to say? What if I was, in the end, what made it fall apart?

What if any problems Mike and I had living together this summer were merely the real relationship-me manifesting itself?

As much as you tell yourself you're worth having, as much as your friends support you, as much as someone might love you — there's nothing scarier than wondering, secretly, if it wasn't really your fault after all, and if you'll just, eventually, end up ruining what you have now. 

Jake popped up on Facebook today. It startled me. A lot.

The Internet is not a place I expect to find Jake. He's not social in general, and doesn't do much with on the Web besides email. He's the last person I'd think would be a part of any kind of networking site. I certainly hope I don't run into him on any dating sites.

I only found him because I was idly flipping through profiles of people from my high school, just to see who was there. His name and picture popped up and my heart stopped, it was so unexpected. And so...strange. Like a violation. He was in a place I thought of as mine.

Someone I know recently un-friended me on Facebook. She just went through a messy, messy breakup with a guy I'm also Facebook-friends with and un-friended everyone who knows them both, saying it was just too hard to see his name and picture pop up on her screen all the time.

Another friend called me last week, crying, because her newly-ex-boyfriend had just un-friended her. Not that she hadn't expected it, but the reality of it was one more thing in the line of heartbreak.

The Internet is a strange thing. These sites are strange things — suddenly we have these visuals, these reminders, these ties. I get irritated enough when the people I didn't like in high school pop up on the "people you might know" list. I can't imagine being confronted with a lost love every day.

I am not pleased that Jake has stepped into my digital world. It's silly to feel possessive over something public, but I do. I can only hope that he remains as lackadaisical with the Internet as he has thus far. Because I'm certainly not going to be accepting any friend requests.

I feel as though I should have been saving up something deeply profound to say here — something that will mark this, something that one might print out and post on one's bathroom mirror. Something deep. Something meaningful. Something universal and marvelous that will affect and impress everyone.

Yeah. I've got nothing.

When I started writing for this site, I had visions of a hilarious series chronicling my forays back into the dating world. This will be delightful, I thought. I'm in my 30s and have been married most of my life. I have never dated as an adult. I have no idea what I'm doing.

Turning the odd and the icky into a column will make the merely awkward hilarious, and what a comfort that will be. A bad first date will have some purpose. I will try many things in the name of research. I will be Carrie Bradshaw, only without the shoe thing.

It was an excellent plan. I had been dating for a bit, so had some stories saved up. I had no desire at all to do anything beyond casual. You couldn't beat me into a real relationship with a stick.

Then of course, I found myself in one, despite the kicking and screaming, despite refusing, for months, to give it a name. So this has become less about the hilarity of Watching-Alice-Try-to-Figure-Out-Dating and more the hilarity of Watching-Alice-Skid-into-Commitment. Which is constantly startling, really.

It has been a surprising help, these columns. Finding the right words for something here has often helped put things in perspective, or decide where to go, or just ease the feelings over something.

So, thank you, those of you who have been here with me, those that have commented, those who have read, and those who write along with me. I've very much appreciated your company, and look forward to bringing you along on future adventures.

You've learned to ask for help. You've leaned you don't need to do this alone. You know you don't have to sit there on your miserable little island trying to cope all by yourself.

But then you realize you don't actually know anyone you can call and say, "I am hurting. Please come over." Well, you do, but they can't. They have kids. They live in other states or across the bridge. They are no longer drop-of-a-hat people. (Reason #732 not to have kids: they prevent you from coming to the aide of your single, sad friend with Nalgene bottles of cocktails and a comforting presence, but that's beside the point.)

So, here I am, in my living room, alone, trying to remember that I've learned, in the course of things, to take care of myself. That doing this alone is, in fact, what I've preferred. Because this week I was hit with some pretty bad news. This week I'm really struggling. This week I could use someone to come and just sit with me. And there isn't anyone who can.

Here's what I recommend to all of you pondering divorce: Get yourself some single friends. Friends without babies. Friends who live within 15 minutes of you. Because there's going to come a night when you need someone, when you're in a place where you want that help, and you'll need someone in your phonebook who not only loves you and stands by you, but is actually able to come over.

I'm in a more cynical space than usual, I guess, because I wonder: What's the use of learning to ask for support when, in the end, you're still going to end up on your couch alone?

Over the past year and a half or so, I've gotten very comfortable being alone, doing things alone. Some things, I've found, are better by myself. I've come to like my own company. I've found that I prefer the quiet, prefer solitude.

Traveling, for example. That first trip alone, to Wales, was very much a ‘well, no one can stop me from doing this, so I'm going to do it to prove I can' kind of trip. It turned out, a lot of that trip was marvelous because I was alone. I like traveling alone. I like not having to worry about other people's preferences, comfort, plans. I like eating when I want, stopping when I think something is pretty, sitting on as many strategically placed benches as I want. And I am a sucker for a strategically placed bench.

How, I've been wondering, will I do traveling with someone else?

In June, we'll find out. June marks one of those relationship milestones — going on a trip together. Mike and I are going to Greece for two weeks.

After having been in a relationship for so many years with someone who did not want to go places with me — too expensive, ‘just wanted to stay home', whatever really lay beneath that — it's startling, a little, to be with someone who wants to do this with me. Startling, but wonderful.

At the same time, I wonder — how will this be? I've learned how to do this alone, how do I learn to do it not alone?

I suppose it's the same as getting into a new relationship, in many ways. You get comfortable being alone, living alone. You start to really enjoy that feeling — the being surrounded by only your own stuff, your power over your surroundings, the never needing to compromise. Figuring out, little by little, how to let someone in.

Being in a relationship again has been rather difficult. Those of you who have read this from the beginning will have noted my general inability to just let things be, my worries, my attempts at self-sabotage.

It's gotten easier as it's gone on — and I've been lucky enough to find someone who is more than willing to accept my various insecurities and let me take things at my own pace.

He sent me an email once. It said, "Everyone in your life owes you patience." I think that meant more to me than anything anyone's said in the course of the past two years. Saying that it's all right to not feel okay right away, to not feel ok still. To need time, to need space, even to backslide a little.

It's a long process, this healing thing. And maybe there's no such place as "healed" — maybe there's always scar tissue. And maybe that's okay, too.

I was getting coffee one morning at this place up the hill — a coffee place I don't go into that often. It's small and crowded, the baristas are way too hip to be friendly, and it's a little out of my way. But it has quotes painted all over the ceiling and walls. I was waiting for my latte and saw this one:

"Be not afraid of going slowly — be afraid of standing still." —Chinese proverb

I had read it before, I must have. I'd been there before. I'd read them all before. But suddenly, this one was personal.

It's okay to go slow. It's okay to take the time you need. As long as in taking that time you're not merely standing there.

What he said next in that email: "You have two choices: Grow into your future or repeat your past. If you worry too much about what happened before, you can make it happen again.

How strange it is, to have someone who was closer to you than anyone, someone who knew everything about you, and have them suddenly a stranger.

I barely talk to Jake, and when I do, it's all business — irritating business at that. He doesn't know my show opens in a week. He doesn't know I cut my hair shorter than it's been in years. He didn't know when I left the country, that one friend is having a baby, that another's cancer may be back. He doesn't know what my apartment looks like.

It's strange.

Granted, he wasn't terribly present for some time, but still — he was my partner. He was half of me. He's been part of my life since I was in 6th grade. Only now, he's not.

And people say, "Move on." And people say, "Why are you still talking about this?" How do you merely excuse yourself from what was once your life?

Ingrid Michaelson, in the CD she wrote whilst tromping about in my head, has a song called "Glass." And, of course, Ingrid always says it better:

"You could make my head swerve.

Used to know my every curve.

And now we pass and just like glass

I see through you, you see through me like I'm not there.

And now we meet on a street.

And I am blind.

I cannot find the heart I gave to you.

Sometimes what we think we really want we don't.

Sometimes what we think we love we don't."

What else is there to say, really?

I carry a notebook around with me. When I read a sentence I find particularly beautiful ("her heart a red cup of fierceness tucked among ordinary things") or when someone says something particularly hilarious ("I didn't hear you because when I walk I hear the music from Peter and the Wolf in my head"), or something that resonates in some way, I write it down. Sometimes one sentence, put together in just that way brings a little more sense into my world. I like quotes. I like bits and pieces. I like the way other people string words together.

When Jake called and told me that he didn't think he'd be back, he was in China. He said, "I've been thinking about it, and I don't know if I'll be coming home at all."

I have one of those "quote of the day" widgets on my computer. The day after that call it said: "When someone walks away from you, let them walk. Your destiny is never tied to anyone who has left."

I don't know why it is that if someone else says it, it means something more. I assume that's true for all of us. Why else do we clip newspapers? Quote songs? Read a stranger's blog on a Web site, for that matter?

Sometimes it's that someone else has found the words I can't.

Sometimes it's knowing I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Sometimes the fact that it's someone else gives the words the credibility I can't find in my own head.

After staring at it for a while, I wrote it on a Post-It and stuck to it to the wall by the door. Later, it moved to the bathroom mirror.

Money, the image that money brings, meant a lot to Jake. I couldn't get a bookshelf or a pair of shoes without checking in first - I would have gotten a look, a comment, a day of silence. A plane ticket to see a friend for the weekend, that was out of the question. We didn't have the money to spend it recklessly.

The thing was, we did have the money. And when Jake wanted something, he would get it. He was an impulse furniture buyer. He bought a $300 humidor on whim.

He thought that, because he made more than I did, financial decisions should be his. He was uncomfortable with feeling this way, he tried to pretend he didn't, but he did.

I have mixed feelings about money. If there's not a cushion in my bank account, I get nervous. My cat might need surgery again. My car might fall apart. I want to be prepared. And, for the most part, I don't spend a lot. I don't like shopping. I don't have expensive taste in anything.

But I want to see my friends, and I'm willing to throw down for a plane ticket to do so. If I have the freedom and ability to travel, I want to do so — I might not be able to later. If that means carrying some debt around for a couple of months, so be it. I don't want to be irresponsible, but I also don't want to give everything up. So I try to balance.

I definitely have less money now that I'm divorcing. I have to watch things, especially since I have to guard against the day my settlement payments stop. But I love that I can take a class if I want to and not have to justify it to anyone. I can go on vacation. I can get a bookshelf.

I used to wonder about couples that had been together for years but still kept separate bank accounts. Now, I see the appeal. I don't know how willing I'd be to get back into shared finances. This way, I know exactly where everything is, and my choices about what to do with what I have are mine alone.