It was good that I arrived on campus during freshman orientation before classes started. I had originally meant to attend orientation, despite technically being a sophomore, because I figured that the orientation would have useful information for transfer students as well.

   That never happened.

   After Erastes closed the door behind him, I continued crying into my pillow until I had no more energy for it. I cried myself to sleep that night without ever leaving my room. Later I woke up to use the bathroom – I think the clock in the lounge might have said one in the morning, but I wasn't paying attention – tears running down my face and into my throat; when I was done, I stumbled, still crying, back to my room, and continued to sob into my pillow until exhaustion overtook me again.

   Morning came. With morning came yet more tears.

   Oh, it wasn't constant, at least, not entirely. At various points, I was able to quiet myself down enough to take care of a few mundane details of everyday life. At one point I unpacked my suitcase – removing the gifts Erastes had given me and finding places on the dresser and on the hutch over the desk to store them was another exercise in torment, but I got through it, also through the unpacking and restacking of the books, which included all the books he had given me, and there were a lot of them – and I nearly panicked over having forgotten to buy basic toiletries such as toothpaste and soap, because I had no money on me; until I saw that in a corner of the suitcase, Erastes had packed my scented shampoo and conditioner, also a bottle of chlorhexidine that came with a notecard on which he had scribbled POUR ON BACK AFTER SHOWERING. USE FOR ONE WEEK ONLY. USE ONLY SOAP AND WATER TO WASH THEREAFTER. DISCONTINUE ANTISEPTIC WASH IF IRRITATING TO SKIN. (SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION IF YOU DEVELOP A FEVER OR IF YOUR URINE TURNS BROWN) in permanent marker, along with several tubes of antibiotic ointment for my upper back and some other personal care necessities from our bathroom, and a new toothbrush and toothpaste, wrapping all the items neatly in zip-sealed plastic bags. Of course, this, too, was an occasion for tears, but I got everything packed and stored, and after a while, I was settled in.

   Later that morning I noticed that I was thirsty, and when I emerged from my room to get water from the sink in the kitchenette, I found that I was also hungry, and I realized that I hadn't eaten in two days, so I looked at my campus map and found the dining hall nearest me and the time lunch would be served in it. I even managed to get there on time and to eat my food without bawling in public and causing a scene.

   At some point, I must have picked up an orientation packet and checked in. I don't remember doing it. Nor do I remember enrolling in classes, or talking to the financial aid office about getting a student loan large enough to pay for the books and other incidentals my grants did not cover, or introducing myself to the resident advisor on my hall – which was a hall of upperclassmen and had no other transfer students, so I was the only one living on my floor for the first few days until the official beginning of the academic year – but I'm sure I did all of those things at some point.

   One thing I do remember clearly is showering unassisted for the first time in the suite's bathroom. For the past couple of weeks, I hadn't had to worry about the practicalities involved – Erastes had washed my back for me with a sponge, while I sat soaking in a bath in a sort of tea made with comfrey, calendula, chamomile, and lavender that he'd boiled in a stock pot with salt to add to the bathwater, and then after bathing me, he'd applied the antibiotic ointment to the wounds he'd made. I didn't have that luxury anymore. For the most part, they had stopped bleeding and oozing, having reached the scabby, itchy stage of healing, but whenever they got exposed to water for a long enough period, they opened up again in a few places, and I really didn't want the lacerations to get infected, because that would mean I'd have to get professional medical help, which would mean having to explain how they got there in the first place. Bandaging was difficult, which was why Erastes had bought me armfuls of disposable cotton undershirts to protect my healing flesh (not to mention my clothing, in case I bled) but I still had to apply the ointment myself, which proved problematic. Eventually, I got used to doing it, just as I got used to the stinging sensation the shower inflicted on me until all of them were closed completely and scar tissue began to form. But that first shower hurt. The only thing good about it was the heat. I had a peculiar chill that had settled in my bones, completely unrelated to my actual body temperature.

   For the most part, though, I wasn't paying close attention to these little details of settling in, so I don't remember much else about them.

   I couldn't stop crying that first week. After a while it became terrifying, at least, it terrified me, because aside from the things Erastes did to me, almost nothing before this had reduced me to tears easily. But there I was, weeping randomly and completely uncontrollably, in my room, or walking down the sidewalk on my way to meet with my faculty advisor, or washing myself in the shower. Once it started, it took hold of me until I was nearly senseless with misery. The more I tried to get myself under control, the worse things got.

   After several days of this, I had swallowed so much snot from crying that I made myself sick, and after I vomited, I looked down into the toilet bowl and saw blood. For a few frightening seconds, I thought I was dying of internal bleeding; then my common sense returned, and I realized I'd merely cried for so long that I'd made my throat and esophagus raw, hence the blood.

   After that my weepy tendencies quieted down somewhat – something about looking at my bloody vomit and sputum shocked me into stillness – and from then on, instead of spending my days drowning myself in my own tears, I spent them in numbness.

   I went to classes – I'd changed my major from philosophy to English, because from what I had seen in my last academic institution, new English instructors were hired far more frequently than new philosophy instructors, and I liked the idea of being hired in my field after graduation, rather than going back to telesales – and I did the course assignments. I couldn't really call it work. It was child's play compared to the four years of private tutoring I'd had before reentering college full-time.

   When not in classes, I existed. I ate meals. I read books in the campus library. I auditioned for a concert choir and was given a place in the alto section. It was a way to stay busy.

   From time to time, I would be doing homework in my dorm room; and I would stare at the white paint on the cinder blocks of my bare walls, and rage would overtake me. Like Heloise before me, I did not like being shut in a glorified convent cell, unable to be with my lover and soulmate, unable to do anything but meditate and study. Unlike Heloise, I was not a nun, so I could have found a new partner for my bed had I been interested, but I was not interested. I only wanted one person, and he was forbidden to me.

   I wondered if he was spending his days and nights longing for me the way I longed for him. When things were quiet at the reference desk, did he, too, stop what he was doing, whatever it was, and stare off into the distance, reaching for our conjoined souls automatically with his thoughts, then pulling back because reestablishing contact with me was inappropriate? Was he tempted to walk into my dreams? Did his memories pluck at him, the way they did at me, begging to be touched? Of course, there was no way of knowing for certain. And that was the hell of it: The one person in all the world, who I desperately needed for advice on how best to handle this agony of separation, to hold me when I found myself crying, to explain to me what I was going through ("Is it harder to get over the end of a romantic relationship if you were sexually submissive to your ex-lover? What if you were the dominant partner in the relationship? Does the power exchange make a difference? Is it harder on submissives than it is on dominants, or not? What if you've also conducted a ritual that bound your souls together forever to the point where your lives in the future, whatever form they may take, will be latticed together like the double helix of a DNA strand, so closely and tightly that no matter how far apart you are, you can never be distant, but you are forbidden to reach out for the link in this lifetime? Is it normal for that to feel like torture? And how can I go on without you?" No answer), who could let me know when the pain might finally be easier to bear, or failing that, who might simply ease my torment by being there and holding me through my ordeal, was gone. I was utterly alone.

   And I was ill.

   It started with a chronic, nagging headache, exhaustion, a chill, and a bit of queasiness; I figured I had caught the flu.

   However, instead of clearing up after a week or two, it got worse. I started to get migraines every day. Sometimes my headaches made me see strange things: flashing lights, or things moving in the corner of my vision that I could never quite focus on. Time began to move strangely for me. When I was in the throes of an agonizing headache, time moved all too slowly; but then afterwards, sometimes, I would pass out from the pain, and that made time seem to skip disconcertingly. Time itself simply felt weird. Alien. I can't describe it.

   Meanwhile, my back, which eventually lost its itchy scabs for a mass of scar tissue, would periodically clench up so tightly that it hurt to move (I forced myself to stretch, anyway, when that happened, fearing that if I didn't make myself move, I might never move properly again).

   I got sick when I thought about food, even though I always felt hungry. I began to live on a diet of peanut butter sandwiches, rice, and oatmeal, with the occasional glass of milk or fruit juice, because that was all I could force myself to eat.

   I was always tired. I wanted to spend all my free time in bed, but once in bed, I could not sleep. The headaches and the pain in my tense muscles kept me awake. The best I could manage was to practice my Zen meditation. I knew how to meditate through pain. I'd had years of practice, after all.

   Then there was the cold. I was always cold; it seemed I would never know warmth again, even on mild, sunny autumn days. The cold was in the marrow of my bones. I could not rid myself of it. I shivered at night, and at dawn, my shuddering flesh would wake me up if I'd somehow managed to fall asleep. It was worst at dawn. Wrapping myself up in my comforter did nothing to thaw me.

   When the chest pains started, I finally forced myself to go to the campus health clinic, after having avoided it for fear of what would happen when I had to remove or lift my shirt for a stethoscope; the less said about what happened when that inevitability was reached, the better. Suffice it to say that the conversation was embarrassing, unpleasant, and involved a few white lies on my part, because I didn't think the truth would be very well received.

   The doctor tried various prescriptions to ease the headaches, including antidepressants on the grounds that I was certainly exhibiting chronic misery, and my other symptoms seemed consistent with the sort of psychosomatic bizarreness that sometimes accompanies clinical depression, but the best he was able to do was turn the pain in my head down to a dull roar.

   Meanwhile, the pain in my chest never got eased at all. At least I seemed to be in no danger of dying, given my normal heartbeat, and the lack of any indication that there was something actually wrong with my heart or lungs, although nothing the doctor did seemed to be of very much help, either. So much for the depression theory; or maybe antidepressants simply couldn't help the form of melancholy that had settled into me, seeping into the very fibers of my body.

   The snow started falling sometime shortly after Thanksgiving. Winter break would come after finals; I would need to make arrangements to board over the holidays. I knew some dorms would remain open, for the sake of the large number of international students who attended the university, and other students who, like me, either could not travel home during the winter break or had nowhere to go, but I didn't know if my dorm was one of the ones that would stay open, or if I would need to move temporarily into another room. If I did need to relocate, I hoped I would not need to share a double with another student.

   It wouldn't be fair to the other student to have to put up with my company.

   I paused by the concert hall on my way back from classes (all of which were on the north side of campus; the south side was mostly for practical subjects in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering, subjects that I had little interest in studying). I did this often. Every time I passed it, I felt stabbed by memories, but I could never help myself – I had to go there. It was one of the few solid pieces of my past that I could still access. I don't know if I can fully convey how disorienting it is to be cut off from everything that was once your everyday existence, let alone to go through it once in your late teens, then to have to undergo the process again a few years later. It makes memory itself seem unreal. Having a piece of my past that I could see and touch kept me from disintegrating.

   And so, I tried to go to the concert hall every day; once there, I would sit on the steps, and hug my arms, and if what I was wearing allowed it, run my hands over the lumps of scar tissue on my upper back, wishing it was not my own skin that I was caressing.

   Today was not a day that I could stuff my hands under my shirt and run my fingers across the skin of my back, bundled as I was against the cold, so I settled for holding myself by the arms.

   A faint leitmotif of memory in my ears sang to me of love, death, and transcendence.

   My head was pounding again. Nearly three months of excruciating headaches, now. My joints were hurting, as well. My chest was in pain. Everything hurt. I was so tired that the mere thought of walking the rest of the way to my dorm room made me tremble. I wondered if that would be my lot for the rest of my life.

   I wondered what it would be like to fall asleep on the steps, and never wake up. Dying of cold exposure was supposed to be one of the more peaceful ways to die, or so I'd read at some point.

   The wind came gusting out of nowhere, landing on my face full on and drawing tears from my eyes.

   "Damn you," I muttered. "I can't do it, but I can at least think about it, can't I?"

   And then I wept. Again.

   The counselor's office was decorated in Contemporary Inoffensive Ugh. Or something like that. I doubt that there ever was such a style, officially, but I can't think of a better description for cheap pastel office furniture, framed posters with "inspirational" messages and faded, bland reproductions of Impressionistic art, fake flowers and ferns made from silk and wire, and institutional wall-to-wall carpeting. In all fairness, the counselor probably found the university-provided décor as uninspiring as I did.

   There was also a teddy bear in the corner, holding a Valentine's heart.

   I hated Valentine's Day that year.

   "So. You're experiencing chronic pain, and you recently had a breakup with your romantic partner?" the counselor asked.

   "The doctor at the campus health center thought I ought to try talking to you," I replied. My reply was probably not a very nice one, I am sorry to say; I have never liked going to counselors for "talk therapy." The thought of swallowing a live frog is more appealing to me than the prospect of spilling out my guts to a total stranger. It's a form of therapy that often seems to do wonders for other people, and I have nothing against it in the abstract, but personally, I'd just as soon avoid it. Why should the intimate details of my life be anybody's business but my own? "Erastes – my former Magister – and I separated when I started college this fall. The migraines and soreness and exhaustion started shortly after that. I've been on antidepressants for the past few months, and they haven't really been doing much good. My head nearly always hurts. It's not a matter of how many times a week I get headaches, or even how many times a day; it's a matter of how much my head hurts at any given time. I've also stopped having periods. I think I've had maybe one period since September. No, I'm not pregnant."

   "Erastes, that's an unusual name. How pretty. Your... what?"

   Here it comes, I thought to myself; well, either the counselor's head will explode, or it won't. I began to understand the reason why the duties of a student of magick are to know, to dare, to will, and, especially around the uninitiated, to be silent.

   "My Magister. It might be easier to call him my former Master, but it wouldn't be strictly accurate, because it was a little more complicated than that. We had a temporary arrangement, or what was initially supposed to be temporary, anyway, meant for instructional purposes. I wasn't bound to him, at least not in any deeply subservient way; I was magically and sexually apprenticed to him for four and a half years, and yes, I submitted to him and followed his instructions when he gave them, but it was for the sake of learning, not for a full enslavement, and even that apprenticeship was something separate from the way our souls eventually bound themselves together. Wed themselves. This is so hard to describe to someone who's never been in that kind of situation. It wasn't originally going to be a romantic relationship – sexual, yes, of course, I thought it would be easier to learn how to do certain things, such as how to use riding crops, if I had those things done to me first; also, I wanted him – God, I wanted him – but falling in love? We never meant to fall in love, because we didn't originally think we were meant to last together, and maybe we were right about that. Teachers and students aren't supposed to fall in love, anyway. It can make the dynamics of the relationship awkward. But we did. We fell in love."

   "Wait, he was your high school teacher?"

   "No, no, I was twenty when I first met him. I went to a Catholic high school, anyway. The classes there were mostly taught by nuns and priests. They aren't allowed to date anybody."

   "So, is he a professor here? Were you in one of his classes? Was that how you met?"

   "No. He's not that kind of teacher. He doesn't live in this city, by the way. He's not connected to the university. He works for a public library. Somewhere else."

   It had been long enough, at least, that simply saying the words aloud did not trigger another attack of tears. I had finally reverted to my old habit of never crying. It was just as well; crying seemed to make my head hurt more.

   "And I'm always in pain, now. Headaches. I get these terrible migraines. Chest pains. My bones are so cold that they hurt. My muscles ache. My shoulders always hurt, no matter what I do to stretch them – of course, that might be due to scar tissue from where the whip landed, we got a little overzealous the last time we used it, although it was nothing that put me in the emergency room, thank heavens, that would have been awkward. He was very careful. He left nothing that would require skin grafts."

   He could have sutured the wounds he'd made, and removed them just before driving me to college, but that would have involved needles, and of course, I'd wanted to avoid needles, even if they were being used in a place where I could not see how they were being used. I probably should have allowed him to stitch me. In the end, though, the bleeding stopped before I lost a dangerous amount of blood, and my flesh managed to heal on its own.

   The counselor's face had, if I recall correctly, turned an interesting shade of white. Perhaps I am misremembering; I am trying to recollect a minor incident that occurred a long time ago, and the mind can play tricks with memory. Still, I remember milk-white skin, and a hint of sweat, which would be odd, because the room was not hot.

   After a long pause, the counselor finally asked, her voice shaking, "You say he was your teacher. Was there a significant age difference between the two of you?"

   "Oh. Yes. Yes, there was. He was about twenty years my elder. I don't see why that would be important, though."

   "He sounds a bit predatory."

   "Actually, I made the first move." And the second, and the third.

   Ice was beginning to settle into my voice. I should have known where this conversation would go.

   "I see." Another long pause. "How is your relationship with your father?"

   "Nonexistent, like my relationship with my mother. And no, my father and my ex have nothing in common, except for both being older than I am, and both being good teachers. This is not about my father. This was never about my father. If it was my father I wanted, I would have chased after my father the way Anais Nin did – and that is a really disgusting image, so I would prefer not to dwell on it. Ew. Yuck."

   What on earth did this counselor learn in college, anyway? Was she fed on a steady diet of Freud or something? Freud's theories of the Oedipus complex and the Elektra complex were debunked ages ago.

   Eventually, the school counselor sent me out of the office with an assignment to write down some affirmations, and list qualities that I found good about myself, to "boost my self-esteem."

   Apparently, I was suffering from "low self-esteem."

   Well, I had nothing better to do.

   I sat on my bed with a pen and a sheet of notebook paper and started to write down personal qualities I considered to be mine, that I liked enough about myself to list them as positive attributes: Intelligence. Courage. Grit. Devotion. Curiosity. Insight. Conviction. Resilience. Imagination. Taste. Independence. Self-discipline. Focus. Drive. Strength of will.

   All these things, I realized as I wrote them down, came with memories; all of them had been qualities Erastes had praised and cultivated. I remembered studying in libraries, or at home, writing essays, and proving points no matter how hard I was pressed to defend them. I remembered holding myself silent and still through bloody canings that would make most people scream, and even harsher things that almost nobody could bear without first being restrained, things that probably stretched the limit of human possibility. I remembered snow evaporating into fog around my naked body. I remembered my first awful cooking experiments; I remembered doing tai ch'i in the living room, side by side with Erastes, and thought to myself that I ought to take it up again because I was rusty and would need a good deal of practice to get the forms back into my muscle memory.

   I remembered lying against him in bed, sated and sleepy, wrist tethered to his, as we whispered to each other how much we loved each other; me whispering in English, he usually whispering in Homeric Greek. It took so much to get him to talk in English when he had something emotional to say, but what he said was usually clear no matter how he said it, or in what language.

   Remembering hurt me, of course. It did not, however, make me cry.

   I could handle this. I was used to pain.

   I decided I had no self-esteem problems; also no need for counseling. Such a hard decision to make, almost as difficult as a decision to wear boots when walking in snow.

   By the time spring arrived, my headaches were finally under control. The campus doctor had found an old-school, "non-preferred" ergot-derived medication that, if taken daily, seemed to be an effective form of migraine prevention for me, although there were still a few days when I could not stave off the dizziness and roar of oncoming pain in my head, and on those days I resorted to hitting a bottle of strong narcotics that he had finally broken down and prescribed for me. I wondered why it took him so long to prescribe them. Was he afraid I would grow addicted? If so, it was just as well that he didn't know about the shopping bag full of "flower arrangement" poppies that I bought at the craft store in the nearest mall, and how they made a halfway palatable tea if I added enough honey to feed a hungry bear, and which I only drank if I was starting to hallucinate from pain or if I was on the verge of vomiting from it.

   I started to force myself to do more therapeutic stretching and range-of-motion exercises to limber up my too-taut shoulders. I found the exercises in the campus library, in a book on sports medicine. I wished I'd been doing them earlier. I also started getting more mindful of other ways to loosen up the scar tissue to avoid being stuck with constricted arm movement for the rest of my life. My motion was already constricted, of course, but I didn't want to risk it getting worse. Several times a day, I would massage camphor and menthol ointment into the tissue, hard enough that I had to grit my teeth when I did it. The scar tissue felt little or no pain; the muscles underneath it were another matter. It would have been even better had I a friend or a lover to do the massaging for me, or failing that, a heavy flogger to use to massage my muscles, but all I had then was myself, and the only flogger I had was the one that had created the scar tissue in the first place, which would have done me little good.

   The chest pains and chills never went away. They were easier to endure when I wasn't constantly fighting migraines, though, so eventually I got used to them.

   I continued to do well in my classes without actually expending any effort to do so. Part of me was relieved, while the other part was disappointed. I was used to more intellectual challenge; I had grown spoiled under Erastes when he was my Magister. Hopefully, the upcoming year would provide a little more opportunity to test my worth. On a wall bulletin board in the building that housed the English department, I'd seen an advertisement for a study abroad opportunity at an institute in Oxford for the study of medieval and Renaissance humanities, and upon finding out that my financial aid package could be used for study abroad, I had sent in an application. My year abroad would begin in August.