Coldest Days of Our Lives

What stings is remembering a *scent*. Not even actively smelling it but somehow *recalling* a specific scent or taste that serves as a connection to something you are actively trying to forget.

What I wouldn't give to scrub the memories...

Excerpts from a book:

Your friends and family may wonder how you could want someone so badly who has treated you so poorly. What they don't understand is that your partner's leaving automatically aroused symbiotic feelings that had been stored deep in your emotional memory. You are left to cope with feelings that stem from psychobiological processes that operate independently of your conscious thought and beyond your immediate control...

... The more time that passes, the longer your needs go unmet, the more your body and mind ache for all that you've lost. No matter how hard people try to hold themselves together, a profound sense of loss intrudes on every waking moment.

The effects of withdrawal are cumulative and wavelike. They often have to get worse before they can get better, a point lost on friends who expect to see your desperation dissipate, not mount day after day.

I'm doing the best I can.

(And not.)