From early August, 2007 until mid June, 2008 I lived with a woman. But I didn’t just live with any woman. I lived with a woman who is the single most influential person in my life up this point outside of my immediate family. She was my Heidi Klum…

It was at the start of my second year working as an Assistant Basketball Coach at Western New Mexico University that Barbara and I moved in together. We moved into a small adobe house with faded white walls and an outdated linoleum kitchen floor. We slept on an IKEA futon that we would later sell to locals for $50 and watched DVRed shows every night. When I got home from work Barbara would often have already eaten but would still sit on our small two-person couch working on her black 13 inch Mac Book Pro while I slowly ate on the floor below.

Occasionally when we did eat at the same time Barbara would make herself pancakes while I ate some combination of salad, protein and carbohydrate. I never understood how she could eat breakfast food for dinner. Dating back to the first time my parents let me choose my own food in a restaurant I never ordered anything close to breakfast food. It’s not that I’m ideologically opposed to the “most important meal of the day” I just would rather have a burger and fries then a denver omelet and hash browns.

After living with Barbara for 10 months I knew that my move to Hanover, New Hampshire was not going to be easy. I had grown accustomed to venting to her after losses and describing sporting events to her in the other room. After a few weeks of living and working in Hanover I began to really missed Barbara. I watched Project Runway, compulsively took care of my teeth (Barbara is going to be a dentist), snuggled with my pillow and acted out my loneliness in a variety of other ways. One of those other ways was that I began eating pancakes. At first it was simple blueberry pancakes on a Sunday morning. Then it was apple-cinnamon pancakes on a Friday night after a long week. Eventually my pancake eating evolved in to a full-blown coping mechanism. By December I was eating pancakes several times a week and becoming quite the connoisseur.

Barbara and I were engaged from late-October 2008 until mid-May 2009 and during that time we were in the same zip code for less than a quarter of it. I understand now that we grew apart during the time I was in Hanover, but that realization doesn’t make my acceptance of our break up any easier. Because tonight, at Rosh Hashanah dinner, I sat with friends and family in front of an empty plate. Everyone else enjoyed the wonderful meal my mom had prepared of roasted turkey breast with brown gravy, roasted vegetables, steamed green beans, homemade minestrone soup and raisin challah, but I ate nothing.

I waited until all our guests were safely driving home and the kitchen was cleaned up to prepare my dinner. And that is why, as I sit here writing this very fucking sentence, I have sitting next to me my dinner of Michigan peach and brown sugar pancakes. A delicious combination thought up by my mom earlier in the day. The only difference between her meal of pancakes and mine is that she ate them to fill a void in her stomach and I eat mine to fill a void in my heart.