“I had a single bed. I chose it because I thought it would discourage me from having ill-advised sex with strangers. It did, for a while. I had my heart broken the year before. My heart was smashed into a thousand pieces by the most beautiful troubled boy I ever met. It was one of those affairs that burned intensely hot, lost steam, and then he started doing shit to see how far he could push me before I would leave. It was ugly, and I took it as some sort of masochistic test to show him that I loved him more than he could possibly understand.”