All relationships, from the outside, appear as a kind of generalisation. It is only to those on the inside of the experience that they feel unique, specific, rare. Now that our relationship was over, and I was able to look at it from both angles at once, I realised a startling, depressing truth. Everything that had made what we had special had come down ineluctably to her. I was the general element in the picture: the stereotype, the cliché, the man. Had things played out a little differently, and had school been, say, a male colleague, I would have doubtless been the boyfriend demanding to know why work drinks had run long. As it was, I had been the self-pitying man-child—why had no one in my generation grown up yet?—who needed constant reassurance that the woman he loved still loved him.
She had always been a great connoisseur of guilt. She felt guilty about the most trivial things: reading a Didion essay when she could have been working, not responding to a letter that had required no response. She would not have felt guilty about ignoring my messages, but that was only because, on balance, the guilt of not studying would have been that much greater, and the choice would in that respect have been made for her. Guilt was so much the water in which she swam that the only thing she never felt guilty about was the fact that she was feeling guilty. Her state of guilt was so innate and immutable that to have felt guilty about it would have been as absurd as to have felt guilty about her shoe size or eye colour. It would have been redundant, too, and she was far too pragmatic to tolerate redundancy. It would have made her feel guilty.
Hers was a contradictory guilt, though, because she also claimed to have no regrets. She was too much a fatalist about her own character to remain guilty about anything for long. Even if she had once felt guilty about leaving me, which I realised now she almost certainly hadn’t, she wouldn’t ultimately regret it, either. With time, and perhaps not much of it at that, she would look back and see only a half-remembered boyfriend who had wound up disappointing her the way boyfriends had been disappointing her since time immemorial. But I had taken the baton of guilt from her now, and I was far less adept at drawing such fine distinctions. I felt guilt and regret as one, and at one and the same time. It was always going to end the way it did because I had been unable to rise to the occasion. It was always going to end the way it did because I could not rise to the level of her singularity. When I looked back, I would only ever see the sharp and inimitable outline of her.