I didn't live at Chang's apartment the first time I spent the night there.

It was the beginning of my second year in the city and a snowstorm was on its way, ready to completely shut down Manhattan. Because ZG and I both knew from experience we were not equipped to handle a storm alone (the last time it happened, he'd had only two eggs and a container of mustard. I had chips and a bottle of bad wine), we left our homes on the Upper East Side to spend the storm stranded in Serria's Chelsea apartment.

The first time I noticed the lump protruding between two of my left ribs happened to be the same day I decided I needed to break up with my boyfriend of four years.

Back in August, I had a date that I came thisclose to canceling -- partly because I had never actually met him in person and I'm always a little bit terrified of being stabbed on first Internet dates, but mostly because it wasn't scheduled to start until 9:45 on a Monday night.

"That's my bedtime!," I told Serria, my roommate who refused to listen to my excuses even though she knows I prefer to be either asleep or aggressively watching Netflix before the clock hits four digits. Like a true friend, she all but pushed me out the door of the apartment, eerily similar to how she'd once forced me out of a cab almost two years earlier when I was starting to get cold feet about confronting a dude who had ghosted me.