To give you up is to give up the dream. The dream that somewhere, there are good men in the world. Men who are gentle and kind, who listen, who don't like to harm things. Men who don't rape or shout or shove. Men who can be trusted, whom one can sleep next to without fear or anxiety. Men for whom lovemaking is something two people do together, not that which one person does to another. No matter what happened to me, I always believed that they were out there, somewhere. If I was patient, if I made the right choices, if I was more selective. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, I believed in this dream. That there were men who would never want to hurt, who didn't have to exercise self control against hurting because they didn't ever want to hurt another living creature to begin with.

When things were bad, I carried my mind away to a world in which these things could be true, and left my body wherever it was. Because no matter what they did to me, there was one thing they couldn't do, and that was to make me stay. In time, I forgot how to stay, could not stay. I flew in my mind to that safe place.

And now I think that maybe it wasn't an accident that when I found that elusive creature, that mythical man....he and I were separated by an impassable gulf. If it were otherwise, maybe the dream would have to have died, again. I might have been disillusioned, again. Maybe part of the appeal was not having to find out whether I was wrong or not, being able to sustain the idea that yes, good men do exist.

I had never really stopped to consider whether, when I found him, such a man would find me worthy.