5 a.m.

I had that dream again. I don't know how I'm going to shake it... how I'll be able to forget about her.... if I'll ever be able to talk about her instead of scribbling in this notebook for you to read... I'm almost glad now that I attacked my cellmate. I need to be alone to do this. He would surely have found a way to read it...

So the dream... It was the same one. Monica and I are dancing to old-fashioned big band music. Everything is flowing. I am tall and graceful. Her flared skirt makes her look like an angel as she pirouettes under my raised hand. When the dance ends, I put her into a dip that makes her laugh. I pull her back up and we kiss, twirling around as the music starts again. We aren't following the music and we don't care. Her kiss swallows me up and we are melding together into one being... yin and yang, as she would say... each completing the other.

Suddenly the music turns menacing and a foul-smelling wind pulls her away from me. I try to hold on, but she isn't trying. She just lets it suck her away and she's laughing. At first I think she's laughing with pleasure from flying, but then I realize she's laughing at me.

I wake up sweating, and my whole body is yearning for her. My *whole* body... And then for the rest of the day I try to forget. I'll try again today. Now that I'm in solitary it's even worse. Everything I try to think of brings me back to her. Thinking about the sky makes me remember walking hand-in-hand under a crystal blue sky in Cancun. Looking out the window reminds me of lazy Sunday mornings, reading the New York Times in bed together, occasionally glancing outside to reflect on the news, or to try to think of a five-letter word for the puzzle. When they let me out to take my shower, the security cameras remind me of the videotape that put me here, and of the surveillance photos of Monica that Regali used to turn me against my better judgement.

Those photos... the way he hinted that he'd been following her. Not me, her! He was following her to get to me. "Every man has his weakness," he'd said. Monica wasn't my weakness. She was my strength. Loving her was the best, noblest thing I've ever done. If getting out will depend on developing remorse for what I did to Regali, I'll never get out.

At least I know she's safe now. Regali's gone, and she has that ex-cop watching her back. What happens to me is beside the point.

For those two years she was in Louisiana the one thought that sustained me was that maybe Regali couldn't get to her there. I had a friend in that field office, but I didn't dare risk exposing her by asking for his help. I did ask about her a few times, but I had to stop. My feelings were just too obvious to him, and I wasn't sure how far I could trust him. Monica was having a hard enough time there. The other agents were all men, except one very bitchy woman who didn't like the competition. And none of them had any use for her goofy ideas. In New York she had me watching out for her, making sure nobody made things hard for her. She never knew that, though, and I bet the New Orleans office was a real shock to her system. Monica, Monica, Monica... I never meant to make things worse for you. I never meant to hurt you. You shouldn't have had to make that horrible choice.

11 a.m.

I'm not sure this writing thing is going to work, either. After what I wrote this morning, the shaking and crying started again, and I couldn't write. And I couldn't eat my breakfast even though I was hungry. I'd like to believe you're right, that doing this will help me get well, but it feels worse.

2 p.m.

Okay, I'll try again. I managed to force down my lunch, and it stayed down. Maybe this morning's writing helped after all.

New Orleans... those two years... The first year, when I was still in New York, I buried myself in my work, trying to forget her. I only heard from Regali a few times, and the favors he wanted were small. I had no plan, no goal, no ambitions, but my hard work made it look like I was angling for a promotion. Or maybe Regali's people decided they wanted someone in D.C. In either case, my promotion was not something I'd worked for or wanted. But I couldn't turn it down. I needed to make some honest money if I wanted to get out from under Regali. Even after a year without any contact from Monica, I still held out hope, too, that maybe we'd get back together. My plan of quitting the FBI, living off my retirement money for awhile, and marrying her, was still the carrot before my eyes.

I had no idea, of course, why she had broken things off. During those two years apart I went back over our two years together, over and over and over... I couldn't see what had gone wrong. She was my soulmate. I was sure of it, and I'd thought she felt the same way. The day when she announced she was leaving New York, and leaving me, is seared into my memory. I remember everything about it -- what I had for breakfast, what time it was when she came to my office (it was 10:13), what I was wearing, what she was wearing. I can see it in my mind's eye today as clearly as I could that day. She was wearing a V-neck sweater, made from yarn with just a bit extra fuzziness. It was ribbed, and each rib of the ribbing cried out for me to touch it, and caress it. And I did. I told her I loved that sweater, and I ran my hand over the velvety smoothness covering her breast. She should have loved that, but she pulled my hand away with such force that I almost wondered if a stranger had taken her place.

We'd had fights, like any couple, but only a few, and there was never any secret about why we were fighting. She was always honest with me, and to the extent I was able, I was always honest with her. But this time was different. She wouldn't say what was wrong. I could see the tears gathering in her eyes, and I knew it was something very, very bad. She blurted out her news. She was transferring to New Orleans, and would not be contacting me. And she made a point of telling me -- not asking me -- telling me not to contact her. I begged her to tell me why, but she refused.

After she left my office I just stood there for a good ten minutes. It was like I was in a trance. When I came to, my secretary was helping me sit down. She looked scared, and urged me to take some sick time. I went home in a daze, but I couldn't stand being there. My bed, the sofa, the kitchen chairs... I saw Monica everywhere I looked. I could even smell her, or I thought I could.

I left my apartment and started walking. I walked down Broadway, and when I got to the Financial District I turned around and walked back uptown. When I got to 125th Street, I turned around and walked downtown again. I did that at least three times, until well after midnight. A light drizzle started falling, and the moisture in the air made the stench of garbage and urine all the stronger as I went past subway stations and restaurant dumpsters. I think it was those smells that first brought me back to reality. I was somewhere in the 70s, and close to home, but I still couldn't face going there alone. I sat at a covered bus stop, trying to think of what to do next, when the full force of reality hit and the tears finally started falling. I leaned back against the plexiglass and let them stream down as I stared at the spiderwebs on the ceiling. My throat was closing up, and I tilted my head further and further back to catch some air. After several minutes, I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder, and I looked over, expecting to see Monica. Instead, I saw a bus driver, concern in his eyes.

"Are you okay? Want me to call paramedics?" he asked. His bus was at the stop, lights on, wipers going, a few passengers looking through their windows with curiosity.

Embarrassment gave me just enough strength and energy to make my apologies and get back on my feet, which were tired and sore from walking. I walked back downtown, to the Theatre District, and found a room in a touristy hotel. I was soaking wet by this time, red-eyed, and without any luggage, and the clerk seemed a little frightened. "My wife kicked me out," I lied. Lying had gotten to be so easy for me since sneaking around with Monica, and then sneaking around to see Regali. The lie worked, and they let me have a room. When I went back to work, everybody around me knew that something was wrong, but I couldn't say a word to anyone. And I never did. I guess that's your point in having me write this down.

8:00

That first year after Monica left I sent her a few e-mails, a Valentine's card, and a birthday card. Even after it was obvious she wouldn't reply I still needed to send them. Valentine's Day was the hardest. I'd made plans in advance.... way in advance. I'd made reservations for our favorite hotel in Barbados. It was where we'd taken our first vacation together, and I wanted that day to be magical. I didn't tell her about any of my plans, and she had no idea I'd bought a ring.

I couldn't take the ring back -- it was engraved -- but I didn't want to. I'd intended it to be a reminder to her of how much I loved her, but it became instead a reminder to me that she'd once loved me, or I thought she had. On Valentine's Day, when I should have been giving her that ring, I just sat in my living room, going through mementoes from our time together, hoping she would read my card and call. I couldn't let myself go to pieces like I had the day she broke it off, so I opened a bottle of wine, got stinking drunk , then passed out on the sofa.

The next morning I felt like crap, and I hated myself for wallowing in my self-pity. I put all the mementoes and the ring in a box and stuffed it into the far corner of a closet shelf, and when I moved to D.C. I made a point of shoving that box to the back of my new closet too.

Things were looking up in D.C. New job, new place, new neighbors... A few old friends worked in the Hoover Building, and I found a few good handball players to work off steam with. Monica was always at the back of my mind, but I kept my focus... mostly. I kept an eye on the New Orleans Field Office, and now that I was supervising organized crime investigations for the whole country I had reason to contact New Orleans. From what I could tell, Monica was miserable there. Without meaning to, I started keeping my ear to the ground, waiting for an opportunity to mention her to someone who could transfer her to D.C.

And then she showed up ... and started working with the one person I couldn't stand to see her with.

***************

Her relationship with that ex-cop had always been an issue between us. His wife started divorce proceedings soon after Monica started seeing me, and he "needed her support," whatever that meant. What it meant to me was that there was another man in her life, a man who could snap his fingers and summon her at a moment's notice, a man who represented everything I could never be... A man whose fondest dream was a house in the suburbs, a white picket fence, a happy family...

As tragic as his loss had been, the idea that I could never fully commit to Monica because of my job -- our jobs -- was devastating. Every time she left me to go to him, every time she turned away from me while on the phone with him, every time she blanked her computer screen as I passed behind her... all those times she saw children playing in the street and misted up... All those times she was thinking about him when she was with me, all those times ate me up inside.

So when I was monitoring the security cameras at the Hoover building, looking for ... well, looking for agents who were crooked like me... and I saw her getting involved with him, and with that insane X-Files office, and then seeing an A.D. shoot an unarmed man... I couldn't let her get dragged into that. I spent the whole weekend cleaning up that mess, just so she wouldn't get into trouble. I checked the New Orleans field office, and she'd taken vacation time, so I thought she'd be going back.

I tracked her down, and found her, alone, in a hotel. I called her, and she seemed surprised to hear from me. Well, I guess she should have been, but I'd secretly hoped that she would want to hear from me. I hadn't slept the night before, and although I waited as long as I could before calling her, I think I woke her up. It seemed like it took her forever to get to my office. While I waited I paced, in circles, kind of like I'm doing here in my cell, and I rehearsed what I would say to her.

Finally, I heard a rustling in the outer office and it was her. She looked as good as ever, and my entire speech went right out the window. She seemed a little nervous, and I assumed she was anxious about seeing me -- anxious in a good way. But when I kissed her, she pulled back. I couldn't understand it at first. I was so sure she wanted to see me... but then she made it clear she wasn't. I regrouped, barely, and showed her how I'd cleared up her mess for her. She didn't understand it, and even seemed annoyed. I was hoping that if she wouldn't give me her love I could at least earn her gratitude, but that didn't happen.

Then I made the mistake of bringing up that ex-cop. Seeing her with him on the tape drove me crazy, I guess, and when I mentioned it to her she was offended. We'd been over this so many times... and it never got resolved. It was like starting the old arguments all over again, and by the time she left she was so angry I thought I'd never see her again. Then she called me an invited me out for a drink.