Lore

You can't outrun collapse by driving into it faster.

In 2015, I was 29 and delivering pizzas for Domino's in Virginia Beach. My grandmother had died and left us her house, which was completely paid off. My mother took power of attorney, claimed custody of it, forced a market sale, and I never saw a penny. My brother, a convicted sex offender who'd gotten her house raided for child pornography when I was 21, got set up in a furnished condo in a gated community. I got kicked out for smoking weed. Tell me who the family favorite is without telling me.

The last time I saw my family was Easter dinner. My brother muttered under his breath about what a whore I was for bringing Sean. I told him to say it louder and a spat ensued. He assaulted me and threatened to kill me for disrespecting the family. My stepdad pulled him off. I drove back to my apartment, had a meltdown, and cut them all off.

So when I say Sean and I had nothing behind us, I mean it structurally. He'd just come out of a marriage that ended the only way Southern marriages can — his ex got with his cousin and had a baby. I had no family, no inheritance, and no reason to stay in Virginia. We did what desperate people do. We made a plan that wasn't a plan. Oregon. We'd go to Oregon.

We spent half a day cramming everything we owned into his white pick-up my stepdad had sold him and my silver Fusion, left the rest on the porch for whoever wanted it, and loaded up the animals. I took Gilligan. Sean took Riley. She meowed from Virginia to West Virginia and didn't stop. That's the level of preparation we're talking about.

Somewhere Better

The drive was beautiful before it wasn't. Once we crossed into the Appalachian side of Virginia the landscape opened up — nothing but mountains and trees with shitty nothing towns littered in between. The kind of places that exist because someone put a gas station there fifty years ago and nobody thought to remove it.

We stopped at one of those gas stations because Sean noticed rattling under the hood and the clutch was sticking. While he checked the truck, I went inside for Red Bull and beef jerky and waited behind a regular openly flirting with the cashier, who apparently was a dominatrix. West Virginia. We shrugged off the truck noise, filled up, and kept driving hoping it would improve. It did not.

Halfway through the state we pulled over at a vantage point to stretch our legs and give the animals some air. Sean walked Gilligan around the lot. I stood by a tree smoking a cigarette while catching drafts of Riley's howls, then I hung my recently deceased grandmother's car key on a branch and stared into the horizon. It felt significant at the time. Looking back, it was just a filthy smoker littering.

When we got moving again the truck started death-rattling outside of a town I can't remember the name of — I'll call it Bugville, because that's what it earned. It was getting dark and the cat hadn't stopped screaming since Virginia, so we pulled into the first motel we saw to give it all a rest.

The room had bedbugs. I found them in the mattress within minutes. When I went back to the front desk for a refund, a barefoot man behind the counter kept tapping a laminated sign that said I'd crossed the fifteen-minute refund window. I begged. I told him we'd barely touched the room, to go check the beds himself. He shook his head and tapped the sign. I started crying, telling him he was being unfair and awful. He told me to leave. He kept shaking his head. I kept crying. Then something snapped.

I instantly felt white-hot rage like someone flipped a switch. I started screaming terrible things — slurs, insults, things I won't repeat and wouldn't say now. I mocked him, shrieking: NO REFUND! NO REFUND!! at the top of my lungs while flipping off the security camera with both hands. I told him I hoped he died in his infested hotel on my way out the door. Sean had already quietly taken the truck and Riley to the nearest Wendy's to let me have my meltdown in peace.

I stormed out, called him, and told him I was leaving. If he wanted to follow me he could, but I hated this town, we weren't getting help here, the place was cursed and the people were garbage. Unmedicated me was a real piece of work compared to who I am now.

He followed. Once I calmed down enough to talk, I called him and we drove in tandem — me apologizing for the outburst, him giving me truck updates while the cat howled in the background like an air raid siren. Eventually he told me to pull over at a Red Roof Inn outside Columbia, Missouri. That's when the truck died. Some strangers helped us push it into the parking lot.

We'd live in that motel for the next two weeks, above the permanent meth-head family downstairs.

The Red Roof Inn had a balcony. I spent my first daylight hours on it, leaning against the railing, smoking on the phone with my friend's mom back home, asking her what she would do in my situation through tears of desperation. She told me I should just come back. To what, exactly, I couldn't figure out, and the thought made my guts turn sour. So I did the opposite and resigned myself to staying. It felt like staring down a shotgun barrel. But it was just a crappy expensive vacation. I know that now.

During the day I walked back and forth to the thrift store next door collecting trinkets I shouldn't have been buying — ceramic mushrooms, a bowl to microwave my eggs in, blankets. Our downstairs neighbors fought constantly while their kids played in the parking lot. Ambient screams from morning through night, just like my childhood. After two weeks of pulling from my annuity to float us, we had to make a decision about the truck. A scrapper offered Sean money for it. We took it.

Good Faith

We found a landlord named Chris who had a ratty rental property off Worley Street. He gave us the place on good faith that we'd both be working within the month. He even recommended HVAC companies for Sean to apply to, then helped us move in. The house was a white box next to a high-traffic road with no fencing, barely any insulation, and a mud pit for a backyard. The pets had a flea infestation — probably from the motel — and I sobbed on the cold floor about it because fleas are a phobia I picked up years ago in Oregon. I slept on a mat on the hardwood the first week under thrifted blankets. I couldn't understand how lucky I was to be crying in a cold house rather than outdoors, especially on a good-faith deal from a stranger. All I could feel was resentment and despair, so I spent hours in the clawfoot cast iron tub taking hot baths while Sean started his new job.

One day, I walked into the closest Domino's and talked to this guy Neil. He was in his 40's, cynical, drunk, and hated his life. He could juggle sauce cups when nobody was looking. He laughed when I told him we'd decided to stay after breaking down. He called his employees losers. I thought he was terrible and was instantly attracted to him. He hired me on the spot when I told him I had experience. Everyone there was a pothead or an alcoholic — mostly college kids. It was the inverse of my last store, where I was the only stoner. This time I was the only one who didn't smoke pot.

I ran deliveries until Neil offered — or conned — me into a shift manager position. He hired this girl Christy to work alongside me. She had the biggest ass of any white girl I've ever met and we bonded one day when I made a joke about pegging. She became my best friend there. We spent our off hours wandering drunk into random shops, third-wheeling with her latest fling at bars, and playing Pokémon Go when it exploded that summer.

At home it was different. Sean was a wreck. He told me things about his last marriage that were horrifying and all I could do was sit there and listen. We trauma-bonded over shared betrayals, sterility, having no family, and having no plan. We drank until we blacked out and fought until we had to go to work. I felt terrible for Gilligan and Riley and for myself. I blamed Sean for everything.

Then Minecraft happened. I reconnected with Brian — a friend I'd said goodbye to back home — when he saw me online one day. He asked how it was going and I spilled everything while sobbing. Whatever he saw in me — someone who needed support, pity, or an opportunity — he showed up for it. We played for hours. We built worlds and dug tunnels and joked about depression and heckled strangers on the server. He was funny and I had nobody, so I got attached. Sean got jealous. The drinking and the fights got worse.

On our better days we walked Gilligan through a sprawling park next to a marsh, ate at diners and listened to college kids talk loudly about their latest psychedelic journeys, hula-hooped to techno on the Mizzou campus lawn, ate deep dish pizza, explored under bridges and through industrial sites hunting for hidden murals. I remember driving past a large Bernie Sanders sign with the word COMIE — commie, misspelled — sprayed over it in red paint.

That's Columbia. Half organic crunchy hippie wannabe, half conservative meathead. All there is to do in Missouri is fuck, drink, and die. I'm convinced everyone who lived there broke down on their way to somewhere better.

Christy and I had a wilder side we showed to specific people and hid from everyone we considered normal or well-adjusted. I was ashamed of it — probably leftover Catholic school — but Missouri wasn't a place that punished you for excess. It enabled it. Some of those nights were genuinely unhinged. But that's not for here. The point is I was treating myself like damaged goods with baggage, and acting accordingly.

When I finally quit Domino's after Neil pissed me off one too many times, things were already crumbling. The game that held me together had become the thing pulling us apart.

Brian and I had been talking like people in love talk when they've never been in the same room. Sean overheard it and confronted me. He told me I was a piece of shit who played Minecraft all day while he worked to support us. I told him if my mother hadn't kicked me out to ride along with an alcoholic whose ex-wife fucked his cousin, maybe I'd respect him more. We were both awful. We both needed therapy. Neither of us got it.

After a few days of driving around applying to jobs and calling Brian from my car, I decided I wanted out. Sean and I agreed to break up. I pulled from my annuity again — whatever was left of it — to help him rent a moving truck and a storage unit back in Virginia. Everything we owned fit in the rental. The place had been that small.

The Long Way Back

The drive back was cold, rainy, and silent like a funeral march. I don't think we spoke the whole way except at rest stops to deal with the animals. We stopped at a motel somewhere along the route because we'd been driving too long. He cried. I lay next to him pretending to sleep.

When I got to Brian's, I hugged him. We had an awkward kiss. I brought my bags inside and looked around. It was a cement basement unit on the bottom of a three-story building with a single window facing a big field where the dogs could run and a rotting oily couch underneath it. That was the one perk. We got Chinese food and played Minecraft.

This had to be better than Missouri.

Then we tried to have sex on a soiled mattress with a broken frame, a body-sized dent in the center, and springs poking through. I knew instantly I had made a terrible mistake. We quit halfway through. I apologized and started crying. We talked on the couch after and agreed to stay friends.

After that conversation, everything blurry snapped into focus. The inch-thick black border of dog hair lining the entire apartment from his unwashed, anxious black lab Lily. The peeled pile of leather scraps on the floor of the couch from her clawing at it. The roaches falling out of the cabinet cracks into whatever pot of food you were cooking. The pile of beer cans endlessly overflowing the trash. The black mold sprawling across the ceiling from an unvented bathroom in the one bedroom with the ruined bed. I made him get rid of the mattress. Then I slept on the floor in that room alone, shifting between sobbing and numb, breathing in mold and dog hair with roaches crawling on me. Jobless. Feeling like a tragic joke the universe made.

I had gone from a pristine, bug-free house with a backyard to whatever my own personal grotesque version of hell this was. It felt deserved.

Less than a month later I told Sean to meet me at the storage unit to sort through our stuff. I seduced him. I told him I'd made a terrible mistake and I missed him, which was true, delivered in the exact manipulative way you'd expect from someone who had just spent nine months making one bad decision after another.

We got drinks at a Mexican place afterward. I told him about Brian's apartment — the roaches, the mold, the mattress, the poor dog, everything. He said I couldn't catch a break.

It felt like relief and reunion and fear all at the same time — familiar and safe and terrifying in the way only going back to someone can be. I'd spent nine months flipflopping between bad situations with total indecision, and here I was doing it again.

That night I called Christy from the floor of Brian's bedroom. Moldy ceiling above me, roaches in the walls, dog hair in my lungs. I told her everything. She said I could come back and live with her if it was really that bad. I asked her what she would do in my situation.

This was familiar. Nine months earlier I'd been standing on a motel balcony in Missouri asking someone else the same question. Same despair, different area code. She told me to take one of the part-time jobs I'd applied for and go from there. Try to care for myself and Gilligan, because we'd been through a lot — almost too much.

She wasn't wrong.

I hung up the phone and breathed in the stale air with tears in my eyes while petting my dog. I leaned my head against the wall and felt a roach crawl over my leg and sighed.

The vet lobby smelled like antiseptic and dog hair. I'd been sitting in the lobby at Acredale for maybe 15 minutes with Riley in her carrier, waiting for Sean and his mom to show up. Riley had stopped eating a few days before. She'd been getting in the bathtub and howling — not meowing, howling — which she never did. She was a quiet cat. A playful, sweet, fat little orange tabby who only ever got loud in the car. When she started screaming from the tub at odd hours, we knew something was off.

My mom walked in first.

I wasn't sure it was her. I kept my head down. Then my brother came in behind her and they sat on the bench behind me and started talking loudly about politics to anyone within earshot and I just knew. I didn't need to see his face. I only needed to hear both of them in the same room to feel my chest tighten and my hands go stupid.

They'd brought a dog in for grooming to pick up. They were having a normal day. They hadn't noticed me yet.

I grabbed Riley's carrier, stood up, walked out the front door silently and went around the outside of the building. It was warm and sunny. Nice breeze. Beautiful day, actually. The kind of weather that has no business showing up when your cat is dying and your family is 10 feet away not knowing you exist. I came in through the back entrance.

I flagged down Glen, one of the techs. I told him my mom and brother were in the lobby. I took a beat then told him the last time I saw my brother, he assaulted me. I asked if I could wait back here. Glen didn't hesitate. He was super understanding. He told me a bit about his own family being terrible to him. He said of course I could hide back here.

I texted Sean from the back. Told him what happened, told him where I was. Sent him updates on the cat between updates on the situation. By the time he and his mom arrived, I was already in a room and I think my mom and brother had picked up their dog and left. Nobody saw each other. Nobody said anything. They just showed up uninvited to the worst possible day and sat on a bench behind me being the same terrible people from all those years ago.

Riley's labs came back. Kidney failure. The vet told us what we already knew but needed someone else to say. Sean's mom offered to cover the labs and the Goodbye, Forever service since we were broke. I took her up on it. Sean cried and didn't move. I asked him what he wanted to do several times. He was paralyzed. I asked if he wanted a few more days with her even though she wasn't eating. Everyone in the room gently said the same thing in different ways — this is better than her starving to death — and eventually he resigned. We put her to sleep that day. She put her little head down during the second shot and that was goodbye. Lights out.

For months after, he tearfully told me he killed her. I always tried my best to be reassuring.

—

I cut my family off when I was 28. Eleven years ago. Sometimes people ask why and I give them the short version and they nod and change the subject. Sometimes they tell me I should reconnect before it's too late, then I drop some of the longer version and they walk that back pretty fast. Most people just don't ask. I'm old enough. I seem fine. I seem adjusted. Whatever adjusted looks like from the outside, I've apparently been doing it long enough that people assume I came from something stable.

I didn't.

—

I lived with my grandmother since I was 6 after my parents got divorced. Her house was the only fixed point I had. We bonked heads the only way people generations apart do — I went through puberty during her sunset years, when she shouldn't have been stressing out anymore. Instead she was managing me and her narcissistic mess of a daughter under the same emotional roof the best she could. Toward the end though, when the dementia set in, she got nicer somehow. I think forgetting everything that stressed her out was a mercy, even if she didn't know it. Including the colon cancer she never told any of us about until it was too late.

The last few years with her were good. I'd come back from a failed two year stint in beautiful Portland, Oregon and she'd chilled out. We went to the chicken house together. I ran her to hair appointments between whatever shitty job I was working and screwing around with my not-boyfriend Scott in the evenings. She let me do whatever I wanted as long as I was tucking her in at night or letting her mess around on the patio playing my toy accordion. We spent evenings watching cable programs while I knitted and she bantered. We had lots of laughs in those last years, for which I was grateful.

She died October 14th, 2012. I stayed in the house afterwards with roommates — my friend Andrea, a girl from work named Elizabeth, and Gilligan, the dog I'd just gotten. Andrea's boyfriend Lou was over so much he basically lived there too. Scott and our friend Ben made frequent appearances. Elizabeth kept her room trashed. My dog tore up Andrea's Christmas presents. We played Yahtzee and drank Jagerbombs while listening to Enigma and screaming along singing. It was messy and loud and mine.

Then my mom stepped in.

She had gotten power of attorney. She drew up a list of arbitrary ground rules for me to follow if I wanted to stay: house cleanliness, grounds maintenance, no smoking, no drinking, no drugs, no animals besides Gilligan, and I had to go back to school for medical — her pick, not mine. It was like a homeowner's association for how she thought my life should go. I don't remember all of them but I remember thinking the list was funny and completely disconnected from reality. I crumpled it up drunk one day and Kobe'd it into the nearest trash.

I failed to comply, obviously. So she forced a market sale on the house. The tragic part is, it was paid off. I had roommates, a dog, and a life there. But to her I was going to wreck her shot at a sale and easy money by living in it. She told me the house couldn't be mine because I wasn't married anyways. I was 28.

After the house sold, I had to move back in with her. She resented me being there but played nice because I was paying rent, giving her money, working part-time, and working out. I was trying. She was tolerating it.

My grandmother had originally willed me 30-40k to set up into an annuity. When she died, my mom cried to me about not being able to give her mother the funeral she deserved because she was broke. I told her she could have 10k of my inheritance to cover it if she paid me back. She said she would. She didn't.

I found out the rest at the table with the adjustor when we sat down to set up the annuity. 25k. That's what was left. I asked about the ten I'd lent her for the funeral and she said she'd pay me back after the house sold. That's also when I found out she was selling it. Both pieces of information delivered across a table from someone who owed me money and knew it.

That 25k became my survival fund for a decade. Every time I got too unstable and needed to relocate, that's what I pulled from. It wasn't wealth. It was close to nothing. And it slowly, but eventually, ran out.

Meanwhile, my brother Adam — who shares my birthday — got set up. After the house sold, my mom put him in a fully furnished condo in a gated community. Adam, who was convicted of possessing child pornography when I was 21 and he was 32. Adam, who got my mom's house raided while her husband Steve was at work. I got a very nice ladycop with an AK from Homeland Security hovering over my bed waking me up that day. She asked my hungover ass to get dressed and please come into the next room. After they exposed his crimes, took all of our electronics and bailed though, my mom and him were sitting on the couch joking around, laughing. If it were me, I would've been out on my ass so fast it would've made my head spin.

She hid the whole thing from Steve. She told everyone Adam was away at school while he was in prison in Pennsylvania, while I moved away to Portland. Our older brother's wife went digging on Google because none of it added up, and that's how the rest of us found out — from a search result.

Before I left, I had told Steve. I had told our oldest brother. My mom threatened me to keep it to myself. Fortunately for her, neither of them believed me.

When he got out, she set him up with money from the same estate that shorted me 10k and treated my stability like an inconvenience.

She told me she was worried I'd end up dead or homeless while booting me out with an alcoholic for "smoking weed."

—

The Easter after I got kicked out of her house, I showed up for dinner there, despite it all. Sean came with me. Adam was there, muttering under his breath about what a whore I was for bringing my boyfriend. This from a man dating a woman with a baby. That was fine with everyone, apparently.

I told him to speak up. Say it with his chest.

A fight broke out. He assaulted me and threatened to kill me for disrespecting the family. Ironic. I remember trying to grab and twist his nuts while he choked me towards a blackout. Steve sighed and pulled him off. I remember the sigh more than anything else — not shock, not anger, just exhaustion. Like this was just another thing he had to manage on a holiday.

While regaining my vision, I tore into Adam about being the pedophile who ruined my life. I don't remember everything I said after that.

Sean was in the kitchen getting food when it all happened. When I stormed out, he came outside and I cussed him out for doing nothing. Thanked him for standing there. Told him to have fun walking home. He got in the road trying to stop my car, trying to explain, and I almost hit him. I think he called his cousin Thomas for a ride. I don't know. I just drove away.

I drove around and parked and sobbed and drove some more until it got dark.

A year earlier, despite being kicked out after the house sale — Easter, to the day — I'd been sitting on a beach with Scott, staring at the water. A wave of calm washed over me. I told him I'd forgiven my brother. I told him I wanted a better relationship with everyone. He was shocked. I meant it at the time. That memory kept replaying in my head on the drive. Forgiveness on a beach one year, getting choked out in my mother's living room the next. It didn't make me feel wronged. It made me feel stupid.

I got back to my apartment. Sean, his cousin Thomas, and whatever unfortunate girl Thomas was seeing at the time were sitting on the couch.

When I entered, they all looked up in fear, like they just got caught talking an hours worth of crap about how psycho I was. I screamed at all of them to get the fuck out, stormed to my room, slammed the door, blasted music, and hid in my closet sobbing. When Sean came in to turn the music off I told him to get his cousin and his whore of the week out of my apartment and to get his cowardly ass away from me. I sounded just like my brother.

When I finally calmed down though, he explained his side. I apologized. It was a rough day. I felt terrible. I still do.

That was the last time I saw any of my family on purpose. That was the day I decided I was finally done with them all.

After that I was a wreck. I lost my job at Domino's. The gym I was frequenting shut down unexpectedly due to financial issues. One of the last texts my boss sent me was: "You're a mess. Lose my number." I texted my mom to bring Gilligan and all his stuff back to me one day — she was not keeping another one of my pets the way she'd kept every animal I'd ever had whenever she decided she could do a better job.

Then Sean and I hatched a loose plan to move to Oregon. The truck broke down in Missouri and we never made it.

That's a different story. You might remember it.

I moved eight times in ten years. Every time I got too unstable, too broke, or too stuck, I pulled from the annuity. It was never wealth. It was runway. A few of my friends pointed out how impressive it was that I stretched 25k across eight-plus moves in a decade.

A friend of mine blew through 100 grand in less than a year. I don't know if that says more about his spending or my survival instincts, but the money lasted because it had to. I managed it the best I could.

I turned 30. I don't even remember what I did. It wasn't memorable enough to hold onto, which tells you everything. That was the first milestone where I really felt the isolation start to break my spirit though.

A few years into it, I ran into Phyllis during a shopping trip. She'd been our long-term neighbor at my grandmother's. She used to pick figs off our tree and host community BBQs when I was small. She had her daughter, Karen, with her. Karen had cerebral palsy and I'd known her growing up — she was always the one riding the pink bike. I actually flagged Phyllis down first, which was a mistake I made a mental note never to repeat. She asked how my mom and brother were doing. I told her fine, great actually, everyone's in great health. We hadn't spoken in 4 or 5 years by that point. I lied because I didn't want her to feel uncomfortable, and I didn't want to look maladjusted in the middle of a Target on a Tuesday.

I do that with strangers too. Barflies on holidays asking what I'm doing with my family. Coworkers making small talk in December. I save face and lie automatically. I don't know what it says about me that I protect people who never think to ask whether the question itself might be a problem. But there it is.

· · ·

The holidays aren't nothing, though. Sean and I always celebrated, even when it was just the two of us. He doesn't really care about holidays, but he knows they mean a lot to me despite having bad ones with my estranged family, so he shows up for it every time.

In Missouri, we made four entrees on Thanksgiving on a budget. Last year, my friend visited from Europe, and we did the bulb walk at the gardens, along with presents and turkey. I even decorated my first real tree. This year we did Christmas at my in-laws with wine and Phil Collins and good company and conversation.

The best holiday I've had since the estrangement was the year my coworker Nick invited me to his family's Christmas. I was working fiber optics in 2018. He just said it straight — I know you don't have family, it'll be chill if you'd like to come. I brought wine. His dad was British. There was homemade eggnog with whiskey, a blend of UK and American traditions, unwrapping presents, and the kind of interfamily chaos that only works when people actually like each other. It was a whirlwind. It was the nicest thing anyone had done for me in years, and all he did was see a gap and fill it without making it weird.

Those are the moments that replace family. Not perfectly. Not equivalently. But enough to remind you that the net you lost wasn't the only one that exists.

· · ·

I married Sean at a courthouse on a weekday. We were broke. Nobody was there.

I shoplifted the dress. Ivory, off the rack at Macy's. Two hundred dollars. I wasn't going to get married in nothing, and I wasn't going to not get married because I couldn't afford something to wear. So I took it.

My roommate, Amber, helped hype me up that morning. She tried to do my hair but it fell flat, so I called my friend — an actual hairdresser — and told her it was an emergency. She lived right up the street. She came over and did a blowout on me. It looked gorgeous. Small mercies.

Amber took a few pictures of me outside. Then I went to pick Sean up from a tire place where he'd dropped his car off for repairs. He was teary-eyed when I got there. I was a little late and he thought I'd gotten cold feet. I drove us to the courthouse 20 miles away and we stood in a dark little room with a magistrate. We winked at each other during our vows, kissed, and filled out paperwork. That was the wedding. Just us and a stranger with legal authority.

After, we went to a cute brunch place near the beach with a porch. We walked in and told them we just got married. I got an omelette. The service was spotty. We drank mimosas and painkillers until we were too drunk to walk straight and somehow still got home. I don't recommend that, but that's the kind of people we were.

Nobody called. Nobody knew. Nobody was missing from a guest list because there was no list.

· · ·

I was working part-time at Williams Sonoma in Town Center when I saw my dad again during the Christmas season in 2019. I was pushing a cart through the store and reflexively asked an old man if he was finding everything okay.

He said my birth name. Not the name I legally changed it to. My dead name.

I looked up at him and realized it was my dad.

I started stammering. I'M MARRIED NOW. DID YOU KNOW I GOT MARRIED. I'M MARRIED. I said it over and over while pushing the cart away from him toward the stockroom. I walked through the kettles and pots and out behind the building until I found a dumpster and squatted behind it. A coworker came outside to check on me. I was shaking. I couldn't form words. She asked what happened. I managed to spit out to her that it was my dad and started sobbing.

She probably thought I'd been yelling "I'm married" at a customer who was hitting on me. I don't know. I hid in the back until I calmed down. Everyone asked if I was okay. They let me know when he and his wife finally left, and an hour later I came back out and resumed my shift.

I still don't fully understand why my brain chose that — I'M MARRIED — as the thing to shout at him. But I think it was the biggest thing he missed. The milestone nobody showed up for. And my body threw it at him before my brain could decide whether I wanted him to know.

He called me by the name I don't use anymore. Same as everyone else in my family. When I changed my name, it was one of the happiest days of my life. It felt like the most authentic thing I'd ever done.

Every single person in my family rejected it. Adam told me it was disrespectful. My mom said she'd never call me that — I'd always be my old name to her. My dad said it was stupid, that changing it didn't do anything, and he'd never use it either.

None of them ever addressed me by my legal name. Not once.

· · ·

Despite everything, we tried to move to Oregon a second time. Got a pod. Got meds for the cat this time so she wouldn't lose it in transit. Sean's cousin out there had a job lined up and a place for us to stay. Everything was set. The night before we were supposed to leave, Sean had a drunken, suicidal episode. Cops got called. He got taken upstate to a state rehab and psychiatric program.

I cancelled the pod and somehow got a refund. Called his cousin in Oregon and told her sorry, never mind, we won't be needing the job or the place. It was just never going to happen. I felt my dreams dissolving in real time. I moved all our stuff into storage and stayed at a crappy Airbnb in Norfolk with no working fridges, while I figured out what to do next.

That's when I broke.

I don't remember why exactly, but I started threatening my family. Texting my mom's old number, my brother's. This was their fault. Everything was their fault. Part of me wanted them to feel as uncomfortable and scared as I was. I wanted them to spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders hoping they wouldn't find the monster they'd made. I became a boogeyman.

I found a decent two-bedroom close by the Airbnb with amenities. Good place. I didn't know how good I had it. I treated it like a prison. I kept threatening them. I bought a gun. I told them I was coming for them. I put a gas can and rope in my trunk. I was going to burn it all down.

Then one night, I was sitting in my car at an actual crossroads. Not a metaphor — an intersection off the main street to our new apartment. Turn left and I hurt people and ruin my life. I end up dead or in jail. Turn right and I can drive to the hospital and save myself.

I turned around. Went home to the apartment. Threw myself on the floor sobbing and told Sean to take me to the hospital. I couldn't do this anymore. I couldn't let them win.

When I was there, I met my doctor, James. The man who saw someone who wanted to get better and wasn't just there from a temporary detainment order. Someone desperate. He was the man who eventually would change my life.

After I was released, Sean told me the cops had shown up while I was in the psych ward. My mom had filed a restraining order. They served the papers to Sean and left. That was it. I never saw or heard from any of them again — except at the vet that one day.

I remembered how after Adam assaulted me, my mom had texted me to say he "blacked out." That was the excuse. So I told myself the same thing about my own episode. But I didn't black out. I remember a lot of it. I just couldn't make myself stop. It ran on a terrifying loop built on a foundation of rage and betrayal.

· · ·

A few years later, after my dad had a heart attack, my cousin Ben flew in from Idaho and tried to play middleman. He kept me hopeful that my dad would call. He never did, of course. Ben flew back thinking he'd done a good deed. His heart was in the right place — he's a good man, genuinely. We had lunch at Rudee's on his visit. Oyster shooters. He called me a bastard for making him drink one. We had a great time. Over lunch he mentioned that my dad still has a picture of me from high school on his mantle.

A high school photo. A name I don't use. That's who he kept. Not the person I became — the version that was palatable to him. He wished I was still that thing. That's all that tells me.

The annuity finally ran out during our last move — into the apartment we're in now. I shrugged. I was surprised I'd kept it that long, honestly. The crew who helped us move in, I tried to take them out to dinner with what was left. They wouldn't let me pay.

· · ·

I don't have a clean ending for this.

There isn't one.

It has never not felt like a loss. Not because I miss them — I don't miss what they were and most likely still are. I miss what I'll never get to show them. I miss the relationship we never had but I'd always envisioned through witnessing my friends' family dynamics.

They will never know the version of me who went to therapy, who got stable, who got married in a stolen dress and made it mean something. The person who kept a dog alive to 17 out of pure stubbornness and love. Who moved eight times on twenty-five thousand dollars and still came out standing.

They're stuck with the version of me who suffered from their choices and was stuck too. Who became a shadow they look over their shoulder for. And I'm stuck knowing that the person I became — the one worth knowing — is the one none of them will ever meet.

You can't go backward. That's not acceptance. That's just math. The bridges are burned and the water's too wide and the people on the other side aren't looking for me anyway. My dad has a photo of a girl who doesn't exist on his mantle and my mom filed a restraining order from a hospital bed's distance and my brother thinks I disrespected the family by surviving it.

I kept going. That's the whole story. I kept going and I built something without a net and I married someone who cried at a tire shop because he thought I changed my mind and I celebrated holidays with people who chose to include me and I stretched my grandmother's money across a decade of instability and when it ran out, my friends wouldn't even let me buy them dinner.

That's actually a lot. It just doesn't look the way it's supposed to.

There's a version of me that looks at a stranger struggling with their groceries and thinks, they're doing their best. And there's a version of me that looks at the same stranger and thinks, pathetic fucking loser. Same person. Same groceries. Same eyes watching.

The only thing that changed was the polarity of the system assigning meaning to what I saw.

I spent most of my life not knowing these were two different operating states. I thought the contempt was clarity. I thought the version of me that could feel gratitude was the naive one, the one getting fooled, and that the version seething at the world for being lazy, broken, and disgusting was the one who finally understood how things actually were. When everything in your field of vision gets tagged with the same emotional negative charge, it doesn't feel like distortion. It feels like honesty.

That's the thing about valence inversion that nobody tells you. It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't feel like something going wrong. It feels like something finally going right. Like you've stopped pretending.

In psychology, emotional valence is the tag your brain puts on incoming experience. Positive, negative, or neutral. It's not the experience itself. It's the weight your nervous system assigns to it before you even have time to think. A compliment lands as warmth or as suspicion. A quiet evening registers as peace or as emptiness. The stimulus is identical. The tag is everything.

In PTSD research, there's a framework called valence inversion. The negative valence system (threat detection, fear response, the amygdala running hot) goes hyperactive while the positive valence system (reward, pleasure, anticipation) goes quiet. The world becomes dangerous. Safe things start registering as threats. Neutral things get absorbed into the threat field. It's a recalibration. The brain experienced something catastrophic, decided the world is fundamentally unsafe, and adjusted the filters accordingly. It's reactive. It's a system doing exactly what it was designed to do in response to an environment that broke the settings.

Mine isn't that.

Mine didn't come from any single event. It showed up with puberty, escalated through adolescence, and by my mid-twenties it was the wallpaper of every room I walked into. It wasn't fear. I wasn't scanning for threats. I was looking at people. Ordinary, flawed people — and feeling revulsion. Not anxiety. Not hypervigilance. Revulsion. Hatred. Malice. The emotional tag on everything wasn't "dangerous." It was "worthless." Including me.

That's a different circuit.

PTSD valence inversion is driven by the amygdala, the brain's smoke detector. It decides what's threatening. When it miscalibrates, neutral things start setting off alarms. The treatment is trauma processing. You go back to the stored memory, you reprocess it, and the alarm system recalibrates. EMDR, prolonged exposure. These work because the problem is a learned response to a specific event that's warping ongoing perception. It plays on a loop.

· · ·

What I have isn't an alarm problem. It's a meaning problem.

The brain has a system, the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, particularly D3 receptor signaling, that decides what matters. What deserves emotional energy. What's significant. It's the system that makes you care about things, that assigns weight to a conversation or a sunset or a slight. When it's functioning normally, it calibrates: some things matter a lot, most things matter a moderate amount, some things don't matter at all. The gradient is the whole point.

When mine runs unmedicated, the gradient collapses. Everything gets the same charge. High intensity, negative polarity. A friend's flaw becomes unforgivable. A minor inconvenience becomes evidence that the universe is hostile. Gratitude doesn't fade. It inverts. It becomes contempt for the thing I was grateful for. The tag doesn't degrade toward neutral. It flips to the exact opposite pole.

PTSD goes one direction. Positive and neutral collapse into negative. Mine is a true polarity reversal. Every positive has an equal and opposite negative waiting underneath it, and without the right pharmacological floor in place, the negative is the default.

I found this out the way most people find out what's mechanically wrong with them. By accident, through years of trial and error with drugs that mostly didn't work.

I'll spare you the full history. It's long. But the short version is that over roughly twenty years, I tried most of the standard options. SSRIs that partially worked but never fully. An antipsychotic that turned me into a zombie because it shut dopamine signaling down entirely instead of regulating it. Another antipsychotic in the same drug class as the one that eventually saved me but ultimately did nothing. Benzodiazepines for a decade. Stimulants as a child. The usual American cocktail of diagnoses that didn't quite fit and medications that didn't quite work.

What eventually worked was two drugs, and the reason they work tells you more about what's wrong than any diagnosis I've been given.

The first is cariprazine — brand name Vraylar. It's a D2/D3 partial agonist, meaning it sits on dopamine receptors and acts as a governor. It doesn't block them entirely (that's what made me a zombie on a different drug). It doesn't leave them wide open (that's the unmedicated state where everything runs hot). It sets a ceiling and a floor. It specifically has about ten times the affinity for D3 receptors compared to aripiprazole — the nearly identical drug that didn't work for me. That tenfold difference in receptor specificity is the difference between functional and non-functional. That's how precise the target is.

The second is fluvoxamine — an SSRI, but not just any SSRI. Fluvoxamine has a property that no other SSRI shares meaningfully: sigma-1 receptor agonism. Sigma-1 receptors sit at the junction between neurotransmitter systems. They modulate how serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate talk to each other. They affect neuroplasticity, cellular stress responses, and intracellular signaling. When I was on citalopram, a clean SSRI without sigma-1 activity, it partially worked. When I switched to fluvoxamine, it fully worked. The serotonin reuptake inhibition is the same. The sigma-1 agonism is the difference.

So the pharmacological fingerprint of my disorder is: D3-preferential partial agonism to govern the salience/meaning circuit, plus serotonergic support with sigma-1 modulation to maintain the prefrontal cortex's ability to regulate what the salience circuit generates. Without both, the system inverts. With both, I have access to who I actually am.

· · ·

There's a sentence that changed the way I think about all of this, and I want to close with it because I think it matters for anyone who recognizes their own experience in what I've described.

The medication isn't creating a better version of you. It's removing a distortion that was preventing the actual you from operating.

For years I thought of medicated-me and unmedicated-me as two different people. I grieved the one I thought was more real — the raw, unfiltered one — even though she was miserable, delusional, cruel, and couldn't sustain a single good thing in her life. She burned every bridge. I thought the version who felt gratitude and saw people as flawed but worthwhile was the constructed one. The pharmaceutical fiction.

It's the opposite. The person I started as — the one I was before puberty detonated a hormonal environment that was never right to begin with — that's who I am. The inversion was the distortion. The cruelty wasn't clarity. The contempt wasn't honesty. It was a meaning-assignment system running at the wrong polarity, and it had been running that way so hot and for so long I forgot there was another setting.

I don't have a clean diagnostic label. The DSM doesn't have a code for "bipolar spectrum mood disorder with mixed irritable features and reproductive neuroendocrine contribution." That's too long for a checkbox and too specific for a system built on broad categories. What I have is an answer, even if it doesn't have a name yet. And if you've ever looked at someone you love and felt a wave of inexplicable disgust, if you've ever watched gratitude rot into resentment in real time inside your own chest, if you've ever known that the dark version was the honest one and everyone who seemed happy was either faking or stupid…

It might not be the truth. It might be the you operating at the wrong polarity.

Content note: infertility, grief, family estrangement, sexual history, medical dismissal.

There's a game at baby showers where you measure the belly with a piece of string. You cut what you think is right, hold it up against the mother-to-be, and the closest guess wins. I remember cutting the string and holding it between my hands and an intrusive thought popping into the picture that screamed at me: THIS WILL NEVER BE YOU.

Not sad. Not a lament. Just a fact arriving without permission.

At least I won the belly-measuring contest. I used my own, after all.

· · ·

I was a very sexual person from a very young age. Curious at first, then active by my mid-teens, then somewhere around 19 something shifted. The noise built gradually — a pressure I can only describe as my body deciding it had an agenda separate from mine. By my mid-twenties it was loud and constant and almost unbearable. I joke that they put me on Ritalin too young and it made me inappropriately wired in that direction for years. Maybe that's actually what happened. But the Ritalin noise and the biological clock noise were different animals. The first was just appetite. The second had a purpose attached to it, and purpose is heavier.

Every act with a partner carried the possibility. That possibility made everything more intense and more loaded. I was still trying. I was always still trying.

I had been sexually active for years and never once gotten pregnant. You notice things like that when your body wants them badly enough. The biological clock is real — I want to say that plainly because nobody said it plainly to me. It is a loud, constant drive, and watching it count down with no result is one of the cruelest things a body can do to a person. It doesn't care about your circumstances. It doesn't care about your financial situation or your mental health or your relationship status. It just runs.

Doctors weren't interested. I wasn't married so I wasn't a priority. I got shoved to the side of waiting rooms and out of conversations and off referral lists until I stopped asking. The medical system has a way of making you feel like your pain isn't credible until someone with authority decides to cosign it, and nobody ever did.

Years later, after I got married, doctors suddenly wanted to help. The switch-up gave me whiplash. A ring on my finger made me a patient worth treating — the same body, the same symptoms, the same years of asking. I went from invisible to viable because a man had cosigned me, and by then I was too resentful to feel anything but cheated.

I blame the system more than my body. My body did what it did. But if someone had taken me seriously at 25, I would have had an answer — even if the answer was no. A definitive no would have saved me years of maybes and what-ifs, would have let me grieve something concrete instead of chasing a possibility that was never confirmed or denied. I could have redirected. I could have found support when it mattered most. Instead I got silence, and silence let the uncertainty run the clock out on its own.

In my Catholic upbringing there was a logic to suffering: it meant something was being tested, and if you cleaned yourself up and did better and repented, the reward would come. Old habits die hard. I spent years bargaining. Telling myself I was special. That the rules didn't apply to me the way they applied to statistics. That God would stop punishing me eventually.

He didn't.

· · ·

Sean found out a different way. His first wife wanted a baby. Testing came back: low, slow, or dead — sperm mutated to a degree that made conception impossible. She did not take this gently. She told him their marriage wasn't real. That he was broken. That he should do her a favor and find someone who could get the job done. Then he introduced her to his cousin, and that was that. He went from 5 or 6 years of helping raise her two boys — playing dad, being dad in every practical sense — to overnight having none of it.

His cousin, Sean now says, took a bullet for him. I think he means it.

We arrived at the same wound from different directions. His came with a verdict and a person who weaponized it. Mine was slower — diffuse, accumulated, a death by a thousand small moments where I was dismissed or pitied or quietly written off as someone with no future worth investing in. We trauma-bonded over our shared loss of a life we both wanted and wouldn't have. That was how we started our relationship.

When we got married in 2018, something in me sealed shut. Not in a bad way. It felt like checking off a milestone I'd been told I couldn't have — proof that someone had chosen to be in this with me, even knowing what we wouldn't get. That commitment closed the door I'd been standing in for years, and I was grateful for it.

· · ·

When my best friend from high school was pregnant with her first son, she was afraid to tell me. She found a roundabout way to do it — said she had a little nugget inside her, and I genuinely thought she was telling me she had cancer. She was tiptoeing around my feelings though. Being careful with me.

I told her congratulations. I meant it. I held onto that moment for years because I realized, eventually, that it was the only time anyone had ever been careful with me about this. One person, one time. That was the full accounting.

Everyone else had opinions. You never know what God's plan is. You still have time. Keep hoping. Maybe you'll change your mind — as if the problem was a failure of wanting rather than a failure of biology. I collected these phrases the way you collect scars. None of them were meant cruelly. That almost made it worse.

· · ·

Here is what nobody talks about: what infertility does to your sex life over time.

For years, the drive and the hope were the same thing. Every act carried the possibility and the possibility kept everything charged. Then the years accumulated and the results didn't change and somewhere in my 30s the hope started separating from the act. The noise simmered down. The purpose drained out. When the purpose drains out of something you've structured a significant portion of your interior life around, you are left with a vacancy that has the exact shape of what used to fill it.

The vacancy got filled, for a while, in ways I'm not entirely proud of. My logic at the time had two parts: one, you can't take advantage of someone who's already willing. Two, I'm a dead end — I may as well be useful to someone.

I had bad boundaries, shame with nowhere healthy to go, and a body I'd decided I was done respecting.

There were good memories in there though. Wild times, funny stories, things I don't regret. But there were also nights crying on the edge of a tub, rooms I left angry, and a layer of regret I've never fully scrubbed off. That's the honest version. Both things are true at once.

The inversion happened gradually. The meds that saved my life leveled things out first — flattened the noise enough that I could hear myself under it. Then the grief wore itself down to something quieter, the way a stone in your shoe eventually smooths if you keep walking. And then there was the simple math of being 40 and not wanting what I used to anymore, which arrived less like a decision and more like finding a room empty that I'd stopped entering without noticing.

My confidence in my body never recovered from what it put me through, and I don't know if it will. Sean's on antidepressants too. We close our doors and handle things independently if needed and meet back in the middle for the stuff that actually matters — the touching base, the checking in, the evidence that we still want each other around.

· · ·

The clearest memory I have is at a Target.

My mother and I were shopping for my ex-roommate's baby shower. This was the last time I would spend any real time with my mother before I cut off my family entirely — I didn't know that yet. She filled the cart. Gift after gift, a pile that came out to over $400 at the register. She called my ex-roommate her new daughter at some point, which I filed away without reacting to.

I picked up two pillows for myself while we shopped. I needed something cute to hold onto in the moment more than I needed them. I held them throughout the store while my mother sang my friend's praises and I helped her pick gifts for her.

At the register, making small talk with the cashier, my mother made an offhand comment about how much this shower meant to her. Since, she said, I would probably never give her one.

The cashier looked at me. I was making a face like someone had just punched me. Silent acknowledgement of how fucked up that was.

The $400 went through. Then my pillows came up on the belt. My mother turned to me: oh, you can buy those yourself.

I wasn't working at the time. She owed me 10k from a funeral I had fronted. I took the pillows off the belt and set them on the nearest shelf without saying anything.

I have never been able to fully explain what that moment cost me. It wasn't about the pillows. It was about watching someone spend hundreds on a woman she'd just met and then turn to her own daughter — her sterile, childless daughter with no legacy who was struggling alone — and tell her to handle herself. That's what it looks like when someone shows you exactly where you rank. No drama. Just a receipt.

· · ·

Shortly after, when things with my family finally fell apart, I told my ex-roommate I couldn't make it to her shower because my mother would be there. She told me I was making everything about myself. I told her good luck with her new mother and her new baby, and that was the last conversation we had.

In a short window I lost my grandmother, the house I grew up in, my mother, a friend.

At my grandmother's funeral, we were all in the limo on the way to the cemetery. I looked around at my family and turned to my boyfriend at the time and said, out loud: the last person to care about me just died. Everyone heard me. Nobody said anything. Nobody told me to shut up, nobody said we care about you. Just silence. That's how I knew it was true.

Sterility was the last note in a sequence that had been building for a long time, and it rang the longest because there was nothing left to drown it out.

· · ·

I'm 40 now and the clock stopped ticking a while ago. The social song and dance around it is finally over — I tell people how old I am, they see no kids, they move on. Nobody pushes anymore.

What's left is old. It's a record I know by heart: dead end, failure, nobody cared enough to help you, what did you expect. I still hear it when I'm at my lowest. It hasn't gotten shorter. It also hasn't gotten louder or plays as often, and I think that's about as much as I can ask of it.

The truth is I've never been financially stable enough to raise a child. I've never been emotionally stable for long enough to not traumatize one. My body knew something I spent years arguing with, and I'm done arguing.

What I didn't expect was the relief. Not peace — relief. The difference matters. Peace implies resolution. Relief is just the weight of the question finally being gone. Nobody tells me I still have time anymore. Nobody offers false hope or suggests I just haven't wanted it hard enough. The people I know have established families and I hear their stories and I don't feel angry or jealous anymore. I'm just glad it's over — the wondering, the waiting, the slow accumulation of maybes that never converted into anything.

I can do anything I want. I answer to no one I could have failed. I've learned to hold that alongside the grief instead of pretending one cancels the other out. They don't. They just coexist, which is the best available outcome. I'll take it.

Sean fills the hole with cats. His cat is kind of a nightmare but Sean loves that animal loudly and completely, and watching someone love something that way has value. It turns out the capacity was always there. It just needed somewhere to go for him.

· · ·

Children of Men is my favorite movie. I went in blind during the worst of my struggle with infertility, not knowing what I was getting into. It's a film about a world that has lost the ability to reproduce — the specific grief of a species that can no longer continue itself, and the way that loss hollows everything out. How you grieve a person who was never there and how that spirals you into chaotic despair. I felt seen by a dystopia.

I've never been able to recreate that feeling, and I've stopped trying. Some things only happen once: the first blind watch, the one friend who was careful with you, the moment at a check-out that screams a terrible truth at you, an intrusive thought that tells you the future.

You don't get those back. You just carry them, and eventually the carrying becomes something closer to relief.

I was 27. My grandmother had just died and I was living in her house, which was already for sale under me. I just didn’t know it yet. I’d been looking for a dog for over a year when a mutual friend told me he’d pulled one off the streets in Richmond. Emaciated, covered in fleas, but housebroken, which meant someone had dumped him on purpose. He was staying at his dad’s townhouse with another dog when I went to pick him up.

He plopped to my feet and got a boner when I met him. That was the introduction.

He was a big mutt with short, stubby legs. Some kind of Bassett hound mix with a big boxy head and a brown and orange coat. Somewhere between a Pitbull and Mastiff in the face, with deep soulful eyes lined like he was wearing winged eyeliner and expressive dots for eyebrows. His front paws had a natural outward tilt from his Bassett features — pronounced enough that whenever he sat, he looked like he had flippers. I called him a landseal. The kind of dog that looks like four different breeds got together and decided to cooperate. Everywhere we went, I always got the same question: what kind of dog is that? Sometimes I’d make up breeds that didn’t exist, or just agree with whatever they thought he was. He could’ve been anything.

His coat was short and soft and would shine when I kept up with the fish oil. He had a big benign fatty tumor on his chest for years — it drooped low enough to brush against the grass on walks. I gave him oatmeal shampoo baths he hated completely. He was scared of water and would shake the whole time, looking pathetic, and get a treat as a reward after I toweled him down. Then I’d spray him with a hemp orange blossom cologne that lasted maybe three days before he went right back to smelling softly like corn chips and slightly sour Swiss cheese. That was his smell. Corn chips and something faintly fermented, plus hot fish or kimchi on his breath.

I plowed him with dental treats, hip and joint supplements, everything I could to keep him comfortable. For all that muscle and barrel chest weighing down on those short legs, his arthritis was never as bad as it should’ve been.

He was always quiet. In his prime he was curious and a little sneaky, social but stoic, laid back in a way that made you think he’d already figured the world out and was just tolerating the rest of us. Not energetic. Not wild. Just calm and good and occasionally a criminal. He used to hop the fence into the neighbor’s yard like a goat — straight vertical, little stubby legs and all — just to go play with their collie. He would run wild around the cul-de-sac with the neighbor’s pack of dogs in our first house together. It was always a joy to see it. Sometimes he would hop the fence just to take himself on a solo adventure. I think he missed the freedom of the streets. The independence of being nobody’s dog. He would also come into the bathroom if you were on the toilet and just stand there, waiting to be pet. You couldn’t help but give him the attention he required.

He ate trash. He rolled in dead things and I learned the hard way that’s why he looked so happy doing it. He ripped open my roommate’s Christmas presents under our first tree like they were his. We sang a Danzig parody song about it and offered to fix what he’d destroyed. She was still pissed.

I couldn’t have kids. I knew that going in — not definitively yet, but enough to suspect. He filled a space I didn’t fully understand was empty until he was in it. For thirteen years he was the closest thing I had to raising something that depended on me completely. By the time I knew for certain kids weren’t in the cards, he’d already been filling that role for a decade.

· · ·

I had a blue ball launcher. One of those long plastic sticks you slot a tennis ball into so it throws it twice as far. That was our thing for years. He’d sprint after it with everything he had but he was terrible at bringing it back. I used to run myself out with it, using him as my excuse to exercise. We did that together until he was about 13.

We took a lot of walks. He had a chunky, jaunty sway on the daily ones — I called him the little brown worm, the tan man. He weighed between sixty and seventy-five pounds, which always surprised people because he was built sturdy like a tank. He hated being lifted and would do a barrel roll to get out of your arms. We didn’t pick him up much except at the end, to get him into the car.

Two of them I still think about.

The first was right after I found out the house was being sold. I was upset and didn’t know what to do with it, so I leashed him up and we just started walking. It was twilight — that window after the sun drops but the sky’s still lit. We walked for two hours behind old strip malls and down alleys and through neighborhoods I’d grown up in and knew by feel. We ended up at my friend’s house. We were both done. I asked for a ride home.

The second was worse. We were in the condo by then, three places ago. Sean and I were fighting constantly — he was drinking a lot and I wasn’t medicated. One night after a bad one, I just grabbed the leash and left. We walked to the state park nearby built on an old landfill and circled it from two in the morning until four. I let him off-leash on the playground equipment and he climbed up like it was built for him. We just walked around quietly in the dark and I felt safe because he was there. I don’t know what I would’ve done with that anger if I hadn’t had a dog to walk it off with.

· · ·

He was internet famous in a small, stupid, perfect way. I was in an online film group for a while — tight community, silly humor, and everyone had their thing. Gilligan was mine. I made emojis out of his face. People used them constantly. He had fans.

Someone took that meme — the one about how a dog would wear pants, two legs or four — and edited it to say “if Gilligan shit his pants, would he shit them like this or this?” with drawn-on poop coming out of both versions. It became a thing.

That’s funnier if you knew he had gut issues for the last five years of his life. Chronic diarrhea. Sean and I had a whole system eventually — charcoal mixed into his food, daily poop reports texted between us like field dispatches, Sean sending me artistically composed photos of Gill dropping dumps for morale. The inside jokes and memes turned something genuinely difficult into something we could laugh about, and other people laughed about it too. It helped soften the edges of a bad situation.

I hadn’t talked to those people in about two years when I reached out the weekend before we put him to sleep. I found the two I’d been closest to and thanked them for the pants meme. Told them what was happening. Caught up. They remembered him immediately. Of course they did.

· · ·

Here’s the part I don’t like talking about.

As our lives got worse, his did too. That’s just how it works when you’re broke and your world keeps shrinking — the dog’s world shrinks with it.

The condo was the last place he had a real porch. He’d sun himself out there for hours, unbothered, on his own terms. But the condo had stairs, and he was starting to struggle with them. The next place had an open porch, but I had to sit outside and monitor him on a leash, so it was less relaxed for both of us. No open space for the ball launcher, but no stairs either. He still played with his squeaky toys indoors. Then we got priced out.

Back in Missouri — years before any of this — I’d posted ads to rehome him. I thought I was being selfless. He deserved a yard, a stable person, a life that wasn’t getting dragged through my chaos. But every time someone responded I’d spiral. Nobody was going to care for him the way I did. Nobody was going to know his quirks or spoil him or understand that he needed to be talked to even when he wasn’t listening. I pulled every ad. I couldn’t do it. I’d rather run myself into the ground keeping him than wonder if someone else was doing it wrong.

Our last apartment together was in a smaller, rougher neighborhood. The previous apartment had a bigger walk-in closet I set his bed up in and enough floor space for him to move around and play. This last place — the one he died in — had none of it. No porch. No yard. Tiny closet. Tiny apartment. A neighborhood I didn’t feel safe walking him in alone. The only outdoor space was a patch of ground under a gumball tree out back where I’d sit with him on a leash. The fallen gumballs hurt his feet. I bought a rake to clear them so he could at least relax on the grass without flinching.

He cost me thousands in vet bills I didn’t have. Money that should’ve gone towards debt. I couldn’t get into most of the apartments I wanted because of his size — good temperament didn’t matter when the weight limit said no. I kept a therapist I should’ve finished with a year earlier because I needed the ESA letter to keep him housed. Every time we moved, every time we got priced out, every time I weighed what we could afford against what he needed, the math got worse. Even today, I don’t think you should have a dog in any place but a proper house, which we’d started off in. If I had known how unpredictable and chaotic my life was going to be, I would have never gotten him.

Despite that, he lasted four years longer than we thought he would. That sounds like a miracle when you say it out loud. It didn’t feel like one to me in my situation.

He reminded me of everything. My grandmother’s house. The estrangement with my family. Jumping place to place with another messy person for a decade. Personal decline. Mental episodes I don’t name in public. He was there for all of it — not because he understood it, but because he was physically present for every version of me I’d rather forget. Sometimes, loving him meant looking at a whole timeline I wanted to leave behind.

A little over a year ago, he’d stopped playing entirely. He had a seizure that took most of his mobility and all of his hearing. He stopped looking toward the door when I picked up the leash and whined more often. A dark bald spot had appeared on his lower back. The tumor on his chest had been with him so long it felt like just a part of him. I never got him back into a place with a yard. I never got him a porch again. He deteriorated the most in the second crappiest place I ever lived, and I hate that. I hate that the last version of his life was the smallest one.

· · ·

The last year though, I stayed hopeful. We took him to two quality of life vet visits to see where he was at and got him on anti-inflammatory medicine for the discomfort. I bought a six-month supply of his flea and heartworm meds — the expensive kind. I got him pillows for Christmas and let him unwrap his own presents. I shared every video of him with my friends. I kept buying him things — beds, blankets, treats, chews — trying to make whatever time he had left comfortable. Most of it was still unopened or barely used by the time we put him to sleep. That’s what hope looks like when you can’t afford it but spend the money anyway.

But I was running on fumes. Gilligan couldn’t get on the bed anymore, couldn’t get on the couch, couldn’t ride in the car. He couldn’t run, play, snack on regular food. Taking him for walks was like taking him for a drag. Everything I used to do with him had stopped being possible and I didn’t know how to be close to him often without those things. I’d tuck him in at night and bring him the hard cheese chew, then brace myself for whatever he’d throw up or leave on the floor by morning. I couldn’t sit with him without the guilt of knowing I never got my shit together fast enough to give him what he deserved. I was still showing up — raking gumballs, buying meds, tucking him in — but emotionally I was running out of road. I leaned on Sean to carry more of the daily weight because I was burning out. That’s the part I don’t talk about with anyone. Not that I stopped caring. That I was terrified the caring wasn’t enough.

Sean didn’t like dogs when I met him. Bad experiences. He’d been attacked before and had real fear around them. Gilligan was the first dog he didn’t avoid. I don’t think Gilligan ever fully relaxed around him though. I think he read the hesitation and respected it by keeping distance. They had a truce more than a bond.

Sean filled the gaps though. He fed him breakfast and dinner. Took him on morning walks after I left for work. Took him out again in the evenings if he hadn’t done his business yet. He still talked to him like Gilligan could hear, even after the hearing was gone. He did the dog voice when things got low — the goofy comical narration thing full of inside jokes that people do to make themselves laugh — and it worked.

· · ·

Around the end, we thought about giving him to a family member with a yard. Let him have a porch and grass and space for whatever time he had left. Everyone told us not to — that it would be cruel, that uprooting a 17 year old dog from the only people he knew would break him faster than staying. They were probably right but I still think about it sometimes.

The last week, he stopped going to his beds. He’d lie in the hallway instead, stretched out on the carpet in the middle of the path like he was waiting for something. He panted for hours — not from heat, not from exertion. We think it was pain, or his heart. He was distant in a way that felt deliberate, like he’d already started leaving.

It felt like not entirely the wrong time. That’s the most honest way I can put it. Not right. Just not wrong.

When she gave him the second shot of the goodbye juice, I had my hands on him and I was gently applying pressure to both sides of his head and it felt like going down in a plane crash. Everything shaky and inevitable and too fast.

Then it was over and I got right to work. Put flowers on him. Helped carry him out. Started packing his things to donate with Sean’s help. Sean was devastated. Between tears and helping me gather together all of my dog’s things, he told me Gilligan was the best dog he’ll ever meet. Eleven years at arm’s length and it turned out the arm’s length was still close enough to hurt.

For me, it was like slamming a book closed on an old story that should’ve ended sooner. Thank god it’s over. I love you and you’re perfect but I’m not, so goodbye.

· · ·

His poop smelled like weed and pepperoni the first time I ever walked him. I never figured out why. I used to come home from work a few places ago and see my roommate’s chicken and him chilling at the top of the stairs together, his boxy head curiously tilted to one side like a calling card for getting caught in the act of being super good. Him and another roommate’s black lab used to tug on the same toys together and lay on blanket-covered ottomans in a sunny bay window. A neighbor’s shepherd would visit our last apartment and lick his face and howl and occasionally I’d hear him do a rare low bark as a response. The kitten we got last year used to use his old back as a launchpad between rooms.

Those are the parts I want to keep the most.

I’m not a pet person. I know that now. I don’t like owning animals. They hold you back — from travel, from saving money, from a cleaner space, from opportunities. It’s more chaos, more emotional weight. Maybe that’s selfish. Maybe I just never met an animal that loved me back in a way I needed, and I don’t want to go looking for it again because I already know how it ends. I’ve lost enough. I’ve hurt enough for a lifetime.

At least now I’m only responsible for letting myself down.

That sounds heartless, but that’s what freedom is to me. It’s heartless.

Before we said goodbye, I built a quality of life assessment tool to help me make the decision. It pulls from six veterinary frameworks and scores across nine domains including caregiver burden — because your exhaustion is a valid data point too. I hope you don’t need it.

There's a photo of me as a toddler where my eyes are already gone. My mother is smiling and my brother is holding me and I'm staring off to the right holding a newer version of my eventually worn out stuffie, Brianbear. My eyes are glazed and unfocused, somewhere between the air and wallpaper. Maybe people assumed I was in mid thought with an early forming brain, but I don't think there was a thought. I know that look. I think the off switch has always been there, factory installed, years before there was anything to be off about.

It still happens. I'll be on the toilet, phone resting face down on the counter, and I'll lock into the beige wall like a magnet and go away. Not asleep. Not thinking. Nothing. My legs go numb before I notice I've been sitting there long enough for that to happen, and I have no idea if it's been ninety seconds or twelve minutes. I'll be on the bench outside having a cigarette, looking at the air between the trees and the sky, and the next thing I know there's an inch of ash drooped over in the tray like a broken finger, still attached, somehow, to the cherry. Nobody taught me to do this. I didn't pick it up anywhere. It was always the setting I default to when nothing is actively demanding otherwise. Not quite disassociation. Cause unknown. Whatever it is, something is fundamentally broken inside.

I used to think it was something that happened to me. Lately I think it might be the truth of me, and everything else- the job, the marriage, the trying- is the part that's performed.

· · ·

Here's what the performed part looks like from the outside: people find me lovable. Not in the abstract, hypothetical way people say that to be kind. But I've started to notice what it is they're loving. It's the animated version. Quick, funny, unbothered, a little tragic in a way that reads as interesting rather than disqualifying. Something they can imagine fixing, or being enough for, or holding at the exact right distance to feel involved without being flattened by it. Nobody has fallen in love with the version of me sitting on a toilet, staring at a beige wall, completely offline, for reasons I can't account for. They fell in love with a concept that resembles me closely enough to pass. I don't think this is anyone's fault. Broken isn't marketable. Tragic is. Tragic has a shape you can love around. Maybe I'm better off as a concept.

I had it once, the real thing, briefly, before I understood what I had. Early on, I was holding hands with a man in a lounge theater in Oregon and Paprika had just finished, and we held hands through the entire credits without saying anything because neither of us wanted to be the one to let go first and break whatever current of satisfaction was running between us. I don't get that back. Not the theater, not the man, not the version of myself that could sit still enough to hold a hand for two hours with a stupid grin on my face.

· · ·

It isn't just me, though I have to be careful with that sentence, because it's the easiest lie to tell- that the world made me this way, that I'm just a natural casualty of the conditions. The conditions are real. Greed gets rewarded and cruelty barely gets a follow-up question, while people are kept too stretched and too tired to develop anything like understanding for each other, or love who they actually want, or figure out what they even enjoy before the next demand arrives. Music- God's language- got packaged and sold back to us in a way that turned taste into a loyalty test, gatekeeping dressed up as discernment, a totally manufactured fight over something that was never supposed to need defending.

But I have the time. That's the part I can't get around. I'm not stretched thin by survival lately- I have whole unclaimed days, and most of them get spent asleep or pacing my own apartment throwing myself against the furniture of a life I'm not using. So maybe it isn't the conditions. Maybe it's specific. Maybe it's just that it was him, and it's not anyone else, and that's the thing I keep almost-admitting and then swallowing again- that I don't think I get to want anything now, because I already had the thing worth wanting and I let it go, badly, more than once, until wanting it back stopped being an option available to me.

· · ·

Strangers are pleasant enough to me, but it never goes anywhere. Pleasantries are vapid. There's so much dead air in the middle of things lately- not sad, not exactly. Not even empty. Beige. A hollow that isn't screaming at me. The way a wall is present. The way I was vacant behind my own eyes in a photograph taken before I could even talk. Maybe the hollowness expanded inside me a long time ago and it's too big to patch up now. I feel like an outline of whatever I was supposed to be. Absorbing light. All shadow in the middle.

I don't think this resolves. I don't think there's a version of this piece where I figure out the thing that turns the switch back on for good or even keeps it on for long enough to fix whatever this is. I sat down again yesterday, no phone, and the middle distance was there, same as always, and I went behind my own face for however long it takes for a cigarette to burn all the way down to the filter without anyone smoking it.