Last year I was getting out of a 11 year relationship, when I met this person you describe.

We met on one of those random chat sites and immediately hit it off. Talked until the morning, and as soon as we woke the next day. From then we went on to talk for 10-16 hours a day for weeks. Shared my art, her drawings, sang her to sleep at night and we'd wake up with the call still running the next morning.

She came from a particularly oppressive culture, and was married off at a young age to a first cousin, had never known love until she said she knew it with me. She'd been married as long as I had been with my ex, yet couldn't get a divorce without the permission of the husband or her father. A father that consistently chose the nephew over the daughter, and a husband that had no reason to give up his possession, but that's a tragedy for another day. The bottom line is that there was no divorce going to happen.

And then she asked me to come. That she had to know if "it was real." She booked the hotel, I drove for 12 hours and there it was. I stayed for three days, and it was more real than anything I have ever known. Later she would go on to tell me they were the best three days of her life, even when I reminded her she had two kids.

She moved out the day after I left, back to her parents. Stayed there for a few weeks with them all pressuring her to go back. She told me that she was going to kill her feelings, that my whiteness and her culture would never work even with her divorce.

Even still for the next year we went never more than a day without speaking. Her birthday came around, I sang her happy birthday at midnight, and had flowers delivered to her work. She then goes on to forget my birthday completely.

I ask her about it, and for the next three days we are back on the phone again, sleeping and singing Disney songs. Then reality sets back in, and the walls come back up.

A few months later I'm in a pretty ugly accident, and she says "You are safe why are you stressed."

I tried to chalk it up to her culture, her depression, her immutable situation. But she said she wanted to be looked at like the only woman in the world. She just didn't tell how to keep my footing when that world stopped spinning.

In the end I saw her one last time, when I flew up for her birthday (with her foreknowledge, not as some creeper) and delivered her flowers in person this time, careful to appear as a random white guy to avert any suspicions from coworkers.

And when it came time, when we were finally alone the questions all left my mind. She never took her jacket off, much less her hijab. Let me restring her guitar, and when it finally got serious told me she could find this anywhere, that she was bitter and cold and mean. Didn't even thank me for lunch.

An expensive lesson indeed, not just for the price but for the cost. I can never reconcile her actions with her words, or her words with her actions.

Of course the macho side of me will never tell of the way she broke my soul or shattered the foundations upon which I built my beliefs. He will just say the next day he went to the restaurant she pointed out, where her husband works, and had that motherfucker make him a hamburger so good he just had to shake his hand and ask him if he cooked like that for his wife at home.