I was seeing a guy from London, and he told me Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were his favorite couple. He was charming, exciting and “got” me. His choice sounded so romantic, so like him.

Obviously I knew who they were, but I wasn’t familiar with the details of their relationship. I lay in bed and Googled eagerly. Was this the kind of great love he envisioned for us?

Zelda Fitzgerald was intensely glamorous and hauntingly beautiful. Scott called her the original flapper. Oh, and they had a turbulent relationship wracked with infidelity and excessive drinking: a love affair that ended with her dying after a fire broke out in the mental institution where she was a patient. She was schizophrenic and spent the last of her years hospitalized.

Is this how he saw me? I had clinical depression, not schizophrenia.

In my head (and, clearly, mine alone) we shared a blind devotion. When the reality of our relationship sank in, he got busy at work fast before disappearing entirely. He told me, over text, that he was “gut-wrenchingly sorry.”