My boyfriend knew he was losing me, which is why he sent me a box of books. It was a strategic move.

After experiencing a traumatic event, I had spent the previous year insulating myself from the world with books, and my boyfriend hoped he could reach me via the printed page. He hoped the stories would remind me of his taste and devotion. He thought if I were to read “A Confederacy of Dunces” and “The Dharma Bums,” the books that drew him back to literature, I might be drawn back to him.

His books were not to my taste anyway, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had sent me books by Zadie Smith or Haruki Murakami, writers I loved. I was already gone, which shocked me, considering the abandon with which I had first come to him.

We had fallen for each other a year earlier when I was a junior in high school. He was from my Ohio town but attended college in Minnesota. When he was home over winter break of his freshman year, I went to a party in his parents’ basement. While everyone else drank and watched cartoons, he and I sneaked up to his childhood bedroom, which was covered with band posters, trinkets from abroad and scratchy wool sweaters.

We stayed up until 5 a.m., then said goodbye quickly. At Bob Evans later that morning, with my hair matted and eyeliner smudged, I told my friend Claire over a buttery biscuit that I was sure I would be seeing him again.

The next night he and I played in the piles of snow in my backyard. I told him I was tough, and he made me roar into the winter air to prove it. On our third night, he had dinner with my family. He ordered chicken pasta and made my mother laugh.

We spent most of the following three days entangled, usually on his basement couch, taking breaks for food and polite conversation with each other’s families. He listened to punk rock, drank Pabst Blue Ribbon and had an ex-girlfriend I felt deliciously superior to. We both cried when winter break ended.

It was understood that we would not be in a relationship while he was back in Minnesota. There was too much distance. He needed his freedom. According to him, I needed mine, too.

During his infrequent visits home, we would reunite. We got high in his backyard and jumped on his trampoline for hours, cannonballing ourselves into the protective netting. We dressed to attend a yoga class one day but ended up fooling around instead, undone by the sight of each other in stretch fabric.

We also had big, messy fights during which I would threaten to call things off if he didn’t offer to be my committed boyfriend, and he always said I could because he knew I wouldn’t.

And then, in October of my senior year, as our one-year anniversary approached, I was raped by the older brother of an acquaintance in an upstairs bedroom during a house party while my friends played beer pong three floors below. This guy and I had fooled around before, consensually, but we had never had sex. I had never wanted to, with him. I was surprised that I even had to say “No.” I was more surprised when he didn’t listen.

After I got home from the hospital, sore and exhausted from the night and the hours spent with the nurse and her kit, I knew I had to tell my boyfriend, but I couldn’t muster the voice to explain. Instead, I sent him a text.

He flew home that afternoon. He attempted to nurse me. He held my hand. He did his best.

I had decided to kiss the guy who later raped me because my boyfriend and I were no longer entirely together, and we both knew that our uncommitted status had allowed my encounter to happen. I don’t know if that weighed on him, but I imagine it’s hard in any case to be a man attempting to soothe a female rape survivor 24 hours after the event. He must have felt like the enemy.

I didn’t want him to feel that way. I craved normalcy. So I asked if we could sleep together that night, because for us to forgo sex when he was home from college would have been too abnormal, too indicative that something was wrong, and I didn’t want to believe that anything could be wrong.

Soon after, I discovered Alice Walker’s “The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart” in the half-price bookstore near my school. That book was the first brick in the wall that I used to shut out my boyfriend. I repeated that title endlessly to myself, a mantra on the days I couldn’t get out of bed or bring myself to call him.

This is the way forward, I thought.

Food tasted like rubber in my mouth. I couldn’t laugh. I’d been sleeping 16 hours a day, crying when I woke up and feeling hopeless about the days ahead. But suddenly all those things meant I was moving forward.

Alice Walker showed me strong women with oil in their hair who knew how to love, as well as how to be hit. The people in my life couldn’t look at me and tell me I would get better because there was little indication that I would. Walker showed me a world where I could heal.

My boyfriend showed me frequent, sincere concern, for which I had little use. Concern for me was bountiful and cheap that year. He also showed me real love that I felt too broken to accept. I slowly began to back away from him in a reverse game of Mother, May I, placing a book between us with every step backward.

He offered total commitment to me once in a Target parking lot as I was breaking up with him. It was March of my senior year, and I had, through the healing power of therapy and Margaret Atwood, become something like myself again.

I thought he was a crutch. A new life was waiting for me just months away, on a college campus where nobody would know I had been raped, where I didn’t have to sweat every time I went to my grocery store, terrified my rapist would round the corner.

I wanted to leave the rape far behind, as if it were a physical object. I did not yet know that you couldn’t shed rape like a cardigan, that it lives on inside of you, dark and slick and taking fresh forms just when you think you have exorcised it.

“I don’t understand,” he said in the Target parking lot that day. “What did I do?”

“You didn’t do anything,” I told him.

He cried. He said he would be with me no matter how far apart we were. I felt the acute pain of losing someone I loved and the relief of being able to retreat further inside myself without his feathery fingers of adoration checking in.

Of course, endings don’t always stick. Nearly a year later, during the criminal trial of the man who raped me, I learned that my ex would be a witness for the defense, against his will. Part of their strategy was to imply I had cried rape because I had cheated on my boyfriend and wanted to be excused for it — complicated lies to muddy a clear crime.

My ex knew the truth. I didn’t worry about what he would say, but I hated that he would have to say anything. I called to thank him for agreeing to testify, and hearing his voice felt like crawling into clean cotton sheets.

“You know I’d do anything for you,” he said.

I did.

Perhaps that’s why I invited him back into my life at the start of that summer. At the trial, my rapist had been found not guilty, and I was cracking. I had spent two brutal days on the stand being pressed about my high school sex life and having my credibility questioned until, in the end, the jury apparently decided there was reasonable doubt.

What happened in that bedroom was awful; the trial, for me, was almost worse.

When it was over, my ex-boyfriend took me out to dinner. He was nervous about letting me in, worried I would hurt him again. I wanted to believe I wouldn’t, but I knew he was leaving the country in two weeks, and I had developed a habit, one that started with him, of dating only people with built-in deadlines.

Those two weeks passed with ugly fights, makeup sex and moments of real tenderness. We were sick of each other but we also loved each other. He slept in my bed, where my stack of books on the bedside table cast a skyline shadow across his face. I stayed up late while he slumbered, restlessly turning pages, willing him to disappear into the warm night air.