"It’s not really about the money, then," she informed me.

"What’s it about?" I asked, suddenly feeling very doubtful of my own ability to control the next few minutes. I felt a lump rising in my throat, worrying that she needed the space to get away from me, that she was bored with me or that I had outlived my usefulness to her, or that she didn't even love me anymore. When you're caught up in moments like that, the logic of the situation is completely overridden by the emotional entanglements you have with the other person. I was getting scared. I’d been down that road of doubt and instability before and the only place it ended was when one party reached a point of being too broken to carry on any farther.

"It’s about the fact that you went from being completely independent, answering to no one but yourself to the other end of the spectrum, all in a day. It’s about how you didn't ask for me to be in your life and one day I was just there, and how, in a few short months, you're traveling abroad with some stranger with amnesia," she spoke quickly. Obviously, she had been thinking about it for a while. "It’s about how you've never said no, how you've never been unkind about things, how you've never gotten frustrated or annoyed with me and all of my weird stories and problems. You’ve been nothing but perfect, and I can't help but feel like it's all like a house made of cards, and it's all going to blow away, leaving me lost without you," she was crying as she spoke, and I felt a little sick and nervous, all sorts of emotions triggering a conflict of physical reactions within me. I didn't move. "Lost without you is something that I can't take, not now, and I don't know why that is, or how it came to be that way, but I couldn't go on. I want to give you space so I don't suffocate you, so I don't drown you in all of me."

"I’ve had a few lessons in drowning, but this isn't one of them," I replied to her. It was, as usual, a light-hearted response to a serious topic, but I knew that she'd understand. She always did.