I want to talk a bit, briefly, about loss. Specifically the loss of a not only someone you love, but also someone who made you feel as if you were worthy of love. I think that’s what people miss when they hear that my Morgan was killed. They get that I loved her, but they don’t understand that prior to that, I had never felt completely accepted. I had not felt what I term as love. Not just a feeling but the seeing of who a person is, the accepting of who that person is, the knowing that they have your back. To me that is fealty, a bidirectional exchange of the thought and deed that this person, this person has my complete support. Maybe that’s a strange concept, or not something that most would conceptualize as love. Personally, I keep my word. And I am very careful at how I word things. Because, If I give my word, I am bound to it. Lie, my entire identity is bound up in it. So to break my word, would be to break this self-image I have of myself. And maybe, it’s an artificial construct, some framework I’ve built in the hopes of being this better man that I believe I was not. But that just makes it more frightening to me, because I know how I was pre-Morgan. If I were to somehow lose myself now, to the point where I become what I was then, I would literally be a different person. my whole personality and outlook would be different.

That is who she was to me. Not just the person I loved, not just the person who saw and loved me, but also the person who began to change who I was. Who allowed this man who sees his road as one of honor, maybe not honor in the chivalric sense, but honor nonetheless. Not through her direct actions, but by being someone who I wanted to change for, needed to change for.

And then she died. Was ripped from me. and I lost it. I literally have almost no recollection of the following years. Bit and pieces. Drips and drabs. But it was like a fugue state. I didn’t feel alive in it. Like a ghost in the world. An angry one. People who know me in that time, think of me now as cruel and mean. And rightly so.

So after that time, I came, not out of the state but realized I was in one. If that makes sense? So I tried to crack out of it. Like it was a stone egg around my heart. And I didn’t do anything healthy to do that. I wasn’t in a place where I could judge what was healthy and what wasn’t. I’m very surprised I lived through it.

No surprise, it took someone else who saw me, knew me, and took the care to break me out of the shell. I can’t say he loved me. Because to me, if you love someone, you are willing to sacrifice something for it. And he wasn’t. I’m not saying sacrifice of everything, that’s a pretty tall order, but something. Given his line of work, I don’t think that stopping taking solo work was too much of an ask, but it was to him.

So after him, I began to wake. I say it’s where my life began again.

But to touch on loss again. It’s a process. It took me literally years. Years to get to this point where I no longer cry because of a memory surfacing, now I cry because, as a plot point, they kill off the spouse or the love of someones life to set up a revenge tale. And years to get to the point where it no longer sits heavy on my chest, a weight dragging me back to fugue state.

Everyone is different. But I know that it took someone external to myself, seeing me for who I am, to beak the terrible cycle I was in. Because when you are that deep in despair, you can’t see it. It’s just how you are, what your life is.