Plus, Gail could be my project. Instead of holing up in my nervous office — where aging professionals kept up feigned smiles and recent college grads drowned themselves in work in the hopes of getting a foothold in a dying industry — I could Save Gail, two words that, in my mind, became the theme of our relationship.

Gail was twice-divorced. She had meant to become a dentist and meant to have kids, but neither happened, so she drank. A few years before I met her, she got fired for coming to work drunk. She got sober — or at least switched to a diehard reliance on doctor-prescribed meds — and cobbled together part-time work at a few dentists' offices. But she came home to an apartment empty and silent but for the hacking of an old, sick cat.

She was thirty-nine. I was twenty-four. The age difference didn't seem strange or crazy; the whole relationship was built on the strange and crazy.

We slept in the same bed for a week because she was afraid her new medication regimen would make her sleepwalk or oversleep. Our sexual workouts were exasperating, two bodies and two souls numbed by medication pounding against each other.

Because the theme of the relationship was Save Gail, one day-long date went like this: we cleaned her apartment, scrubbing cat puke and transferring piles of clutter into drawers and closets. Then I drove her to the laundromat and treated her to dinner at a cheap faux-Mexican place she liked. As depressed people are encouraged to do, we spent vast amounts of time talking.

"Do you ever think about marriage or kids?" she asked me once.

"I just don't know," I said.

"But it's not something you think you want," she said.

"I know you're older than me..."

"And the age difference is too much..."

"And then there is how we met..."

"...which is just weird, and you want to break up?" Gail's quick-fire cognitions wouldn't wait for me to finish my sentences. She wanted what seemed like inevitable rejection to be quick.

"What I am trying to say is that there are a lot of risks in this relationship, and I love you, so I'm willing to take them," I said.

A few days after we cleaned out her apartment, a pot of tomato bisque boiled over onto her newly scrubbed stove. Gail began crying hysterically. I tried to calm her down by putting my arms around her waist and swaying her back and forth. She broke free, turned around, and said flatly, "I need Klonopin and I lost my bottle. Can I have some of yours?"

We both knew she hadn't lost her bottle, and maybe we also both knew I was too much of a pushover to scold her for downing a month's worth in two weeks. I gave her three tablets and rubbed her shoulders as she fell into a hazy sleep. Later, I got out of bed to re-clean the stove.

A few nights later, I let her drag me to a neighborhood bar, where she knocked back shots, fast. As she got frustrated trying to work the internet jukebox, I convinced her to go back to my place. She said she'd need her car there to get to work the next day and, before I could stop her, she was in it, drunk. I called her cell phone and guided her to my apartment. Then I threw a comforter around her and laid her out on the couch. The next day, she didn't want to talk about it. "I don't want to have a conversation where I have to be the jerk," she said.

Next weekend, we made plans to go hiking again — to be away from gloomy apartments, decayed city streets, and booze — but by that time Gail had convinced her doctor to prescribe her muscle relaxants. We drove to a 722-acre park, but she didn't make it past the pond near the entrance. She sat down on the dam containing it, dangled her legs above the water, and dozed off.

I held it in when she rambled through dinner that night. I managed to contain myself when she got pouty and invited herself to sleep over at my place. I didn't get mad when she nodded off and left it to me to gather up the laundry basket of make-up, medication, and clothes she needed to spend the night. But I finally blew up when she tracked mud and grass into my apartment and then flopped over on the couch.

"Get out," I said. "I don't care how you get home. Just get out."

"What?" she said.

Then it all came out — all my pent-up disappointment and disgust. "You're becoming a drunk again," I said, "and I can't handle that in my life right now."

She just stood there, tears dripping down her face. I'd finally disarmed her of her machine-gun speech pattern and without it, she looked so defenseless.

 "I'm sorry," I said, "but I need you to go." And she did. The next day, I woke up and saw she had sent me a long text, apologizing for having a "princess complex."

I never replied. It'd be self-serving to say that was for both our sakes, but Gail had become the last remnant of my time as a mental patient. My editor had slowly upped my workload back to the ungodly pile that was the norm in the newspaper industry, and I didn't sense whispering around me at the office anymore. For better or worse, I deleted Gail's text and walked back onto the garbage-strewn streets of Bridgeport and into the dour office, sitting down at my desk a half-hour before I was supposed to.