It's been almost a month since we broke up, since I was dumped, drunk and in his house barely able to grasp what he was telling me, but then we weren't really together either and so like the war on meaning being perpetrated by one un-named superpower, orwellian goodspeak like, I wasn't really being dumped was I? I can tell, he said, that what you want is a boyfriend and I'm not really looking for that right now, my face blank with soused incomprehension. I actually had to message him the next day for clarification, saying "I don't have a clear recollection of the events last night but my vague understanding is that you've ended whatever was going on, yes?"

These three weeks now hang in some relational null space where I was denied the nomenclature, the right to definition, that my brain so needs to file and forget. He was my un-boyfriend in our un-relationship and that's about as good as I can manage. Just another un-event in my life that I can't own.

But words like "define" and "own" are bad, right? Who do I think I am John Hanning Speke? It was only three weeks after all and in my own defence I avoided words like "boyfriend" and "relationship" like they were tabu and they were. I gave him the distance I thought he wanted, and accommodated as best as I could as I explored this new world, keeping my developing taxonomy to myself (as best as I could).

It's true enough though, he had a point, I really did want a boyfriend. I had this fantasy, one that he actually suggested, where we were on a road trip heading west, sleeping by the beach in my new tent, cooking imaginatively prepared 2-minute noodles while a small pup yapped at our feet; excited just to be anywhere. But when I think about this un-dream, the dog is blurred, like a television prime-time news criminal, shifting brown and grey and then black. It stopped there, unfinished.

It is possible, I warrant that I was fixated more on the idea of being in a relationship, of wanting a boyfriend, with all these dreams and fantasies, than I was really interested in him and while I can see how the imposition of ideas upon reality is fraught with problems, the pressure it places on something new and fragile, someone was actually interested in me beyond the first night fuck and I was caught in the novelty of it all, the hope it offered, wanting to see where things lead. So for three weeks I stood confused, unsure what was really going on and then finally, three weeks later, it ended and now I am left no less confused. All I know is the un-relationship is gone and I am single again: solidly, verifiably single.