Just said goodbye to the person who, with big gaps, has been my guiding light for most of the months of the last three years (though very nearly unmarked in these labyrinthine pages, as a matter of policy). We fit remarkably well together and never had any serious differences. She took care of me sweetly, and moved me to take care of her. The one really happy and stable relationship of my life to date.

The past two years have been the shallowest depression of my life. Almost all of the strong forces in my life had evaporated back in '09, and now I sometimes feel like an over-baked potato, wrinkly and deflated.

The prolonged, mild depression has been surprisingly good for me, in the sense that I'm able to see all my previous, profound depressions as wild swings of a needle that is capable of mellowing and finding a modest but interesting variation. I am one of those slightly bi-polar (bi-winning?) people who could not live without some alternation between moroseness and exhilaration, so I'm glad to see the needle still swinging.

This nurturing love that I've had has also opened me to the value of forgetting oneself, of throwing away one's own hangups and taking care of another. For once the value of this relationship was not how witty, how gorgeous, how intellectual the other was, but just how much she made me want to hold her up, and entertain her, and how compatibly that desire met with hers.

And I say au revoir with great sadness, a sense of (perhaps) losing something irretrievably, and a feeling of enduring comfort and pride at all I've gained from this.