It was too hard, I decided, trying to change. I spent the next week thinking instead of the ways I might die – violent ends such as racing up the ramp in Ivo's sports car, slamming into the barrier, careening over the edge and falling falling down down down until impact when I would be instantly incinerated, exploded into a billion burning bits. I imagined the loneliness of the five-second journey through the air, what I might feel as I faced my own demise. I had no fear of God. Either I had become like Danny's narcissistic artist or the fear of living simply dwarfed any concerns for the After.

I imagined a quiet death – sitting in the car in the closed garage asphyxiating myself on carbon monoxide, headphones on and listening to something morbidly depressing. Most of the operas I loved were morbidly depressing. Then I remembered someone saying you coughed violently, throwing up your innards even, and it shattered my ideal quiet departure.

I thought of taking copious amounts of sleeping pills like Marilyn Monroe. I had access to them but wasn't sure the kind I had would kill me. With my luck, I'd wind up in the hospital.

I imagined drowning myself like Ophelia. I wasn't sure why I thought of Ophelia. Did suicide make one weak, womanly? I probably should have thought of Romeo, he of the poison draught. Juliet stabbed herself… I wasn't sure what made me think of that. Anyway drowning seemed violent and I wanted something peaceful.

I wondered why God couldn't just strike me dead in my sleep. Maybe Ivo was right, maybe there was no God. I looked back on my life and wondered where God had been in that sordid piece of history.

I wished I could be crushed by huge stones falling down on me, a stone slab that would obliterate me before I could think - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom speeded up.

I wished I could swallow cyanide and be dead as soon as I bit down on the capsule.

I wished I could have been like McAuliffe, blown to bits on the space shuttle.

The phone rang. I might not have answered it but secretly I was hoping it was Ivo. I hadn't spoken to him since he left. So I did, and it was.

We spent a very happy hour chatting. He was ecstatic to be back on the ocean, in the cold. Martin always said he was like a malamute, ice was in his blood. I felt there was much justification for this theory as he clearly grew more animated in glacial climates. He had very much loved Ushuaia as he loved all new places; it had a pleasant park in which he passed a languid afternoon but the Falklands left him gobsmacked. He had literally never seen anything so breathtaking. He spoke like a child - not of preserved remains and their importance in the history of the earth but of the antics of living creatures: the many different birds including a vast array of penguins kept him entertained much of the day (he was making videos with the camcorder to show me, something quite out of character for him); the fur seals were a spectacle and an albino pup mistook him for his mother and flopped after him barking for help until he did something that violated not only the law of the land but his own personal code of ethics - carried it back to its herd; last but not least, he passed many happy hours in the company of bleating sheep which brought to mind our trip to Scotland when we were stopped for a full hour (it was actually about ten minutes but with Ivo shouting at the farmer it had indeed felt like an hour) at the sheep crossing. I wasn't entirely sure why that memory made him happy. It made me cringe. So much for differing perspectives.

He missed me terribly, he said. So great was his longing to be with me again he wasn't enjoying himself the way he should but I sensed that he actually missed me less in that new environment. He was making friends – a very famous geologist, several graduate students, a lovely couple from New York who had already invited us to visit and a famous novelist who was picking his brain for ideas for her next book (I had to admit I was envious). I felt strange listening to him; I felt like a parent whose child was away at camp. The child feels the necessity to miss the parent but is so busy having a wonderful adventure it only remembers that appropriate sentiment when the designated time to call home is at hand. Ivo missed me because he was supposed to miss me, because that is what lovers who are apart do.

It should have made me feel better, knowing that he was not agonizing over me. It lifted from my shoulders the huge responsibility of making him happy. But it didn't. It actually made me ache for him more. I hated myself for even thinking it, for seriously considering something so puerile. But I couldn't help myself. I seemed to fall naturally into that role with him. And I needed him, far more now than ever before.

"I want you to come home!" I burst into tears.