Six years ago, my husband hit bottom in his sex addiction and ended his relationship with Sarah, a young woman from Israel. Mark had met her on a business trip abroad and the two kept up an exchange of pictures, phone calls and sexually explicit e-mail messages for several years. The year my son was born, Sarah took a one year work assignment in a city less than an hour away from us. With the stress that accompanied Austen’s birth and first year of life, Mark’s sexual addiction escalated, and among other things, this escalation included encounters with the now conveniently located Sarah. It took Mark another year after he ended things with Sarah before he admitted that he had a problem and entered recovery, but it was his last encounter with her that marked his low point.

Mark’s relationship with Sarah, in part because of the timing and in part because of its symbolic importance, has always held a special significance and pain for me. In the early days of recovery, I used to Google Sarah’s name periodically, hoping (in all honesty) to come across news that she had died in some sudden and horrific manner. But I never did find anything.

Her full name is, apparently, not very common; I would type it in only to get “no results found” in return. As time went on, the “no results found” that followed my search entry came to be soothing and comforting. It was as if, when Sarah left the U.S. at the end of her year here, she had moved to someplace so distant that even Google couldn’t find her. She had another life in another place and didn’t touch my world any longer.

Yesterday, I was searching for an old friend, and having unexpectedly found that person, it occurred to me to look for Sarah once more. I typed in her name expecting to get that familiar, comforting “no results found,” but instead, there she was. On Facebook. On websites related to her job and volunteer work. On sites of her friends. Suddenly Facebook and Google both knew who she was and where to find her, and so did I.

I got this burning ache and a raging itch to drink in that crazy pain again. I wanted to send her a message and tell her that I knew her secrets. I wanted to look at her friends and see what other older married men she’d friended. I wanted to take a knife to my old scars and probe the wound, because something about the pain felt good. I wanted to savor it. I wanted it to linger. I had gone looking for comfort, but finding that familiar pain, I wanted to fall into its seductive embrace again.

But when I stopped and realized that, it felt like shaking off a dark dream. I never before had such a vivid understanding of the desire to cut oneself until I saw myself trying to stir up those painful emotions by looking more and deeper; I wasn’t cutting myself physically, but I was cutting myself emotionally. I’ve spent five years healing those wounds, learning to have love and forgiveness and compassion for everyone involved in that situation: Sarah, Mark, me. And what I was feeling in that moment, seeing the search results that now followed her name, wasn’t about where I am now; it was about where I used to be and my deep, secret desire for the old, familiar enjoyment of that pain.