'The expression "making love" doesn't make any sense,' I told you earnestly. My lips were painted deep wine red and wrinkled at the strangeness of those alien words in my mouth. 'It's not a pair of jeans, or silver foil. You don't make it. It's like energy: it can change, it can dissipate, like static electricity. But you can't make it, can't destroy it. It just is.'

You looked like you almost believed me. It did the trick anyway, because shortly afterwards, you leaned in close and my lipstick smudged against your mouth as we kissed. A little later still, we were doing something that I would not call making love.

I think you wrote that spiel off as a bit of post-feminist bullshit at the time, some bid to sound edgy and opinionated, but I stood by every word of it.

Now, I close the door on you for what I know, even if you don't, will be the last time. We never 'made' love, not one ounce of it, but we both had a good go at unmaking it. We deconstructed, disassembled, quantified. We weighed and measured what we had and, in the end, it was we who were found wanting. We reduced love to a series of glandular impulses and practical needs.

By the time we were done dismantling, there was nothing left - not even static electricity. Anything we may have once had is now, like the bed where I left you sleeping:

unmade.

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