Dear Miss Misery,

I feel you girl! Let me tell you about a particularly nasty heartbreak of mine: I'll call her Whitney.

Whitney and I had a torrid affair that only lasted one month, after which she promptly moved to Vermont, leaving me longing and lonely in her wake.

There's the type of loss that feels like an egg rotting inside your chest—a slow and deliberate pain that spreads the longer it's left unchecked. Then there's the one where a claw reaches inside you and tears something out, leaving you to fill the space with whatever you can just to get by. The second type was my style after Whitney.

I wrote love poetry, hate poetry and desperate missives I knew I'd never send her. I quit my job and ate peanut butter for weeks without leaving my apartment. I never slept for longer than an hour without waking up in a panic. I launched myself into a series of short-lived relationships, all of which were thinly-veiled substitutes for Whitney. Each woman I dated had at least one of Whitney's traits; long brown hair, or lots of tattoos or a shy demeanor. At least a few of them even had Whitney's lisp. It was trite and obvious. I was pathetic.