Through a hundred-proof crack of fatigue, I slipped. Revealed a rare glimpse of my bruised humanity. Briefly opened the split curtains of emotional camouflage. Raged openly in a measured overnight temper tantrum.
I threw up honest words. All the way across an ocean. The words not often accessible to those of my gender. Or station. But I wrote them all the same.
Then I collapsed, exhausted and exposed, into another night of 517 nothingness.
Alone.
But weakness isn’t allowed. Not for those whose destiny it is to provide, anyway. The ones responsible for protecting the weak. The silent guardians of righteous intentions. The stoic peacekeepers of emotional equilibrium. The ones tasked with the difficulty of building a new world from nothing. Only to be rewarded with labels of toxicity once we do. Or burdened with the unfair accusations of privilege, despite the actual meagerness of possession.
But it’s never been about what you have. It’s about what you have to give. And I am currently giving it my all. With every word that I write. Every tin monster I fight. And every fucking mile of that drive down to a medical complex. That awful building where I sit in muted sterility, playing silly waiting room games to help her pass the time. Holding a hand I can feel growing weaker and more frail with every visit.
And I’m terrified of losing that grip.
Every part of me wants to rage and scream at the injustice of it all. To let loose the gekkering of my shattering heart. And argue against the universal screenwriters for having written us so egregiously into the corner of this horrible story.
But it’s impossible to let those emotions show. Or to change the script in any meaningful way. Erosion simply refuses to be edited into remission. No matter how cleverly I frame the argument. Or how hard I secretly pray to an idea. The one that turned a back on me long before I had the opportunity to turn mine.
Left silently screaming for help, I vomited out that text. The text that made it all the way to a tiny island clinging to an African coast. If circumstances were perhaps more gentle, it would almost be an impressive technological achievement. But instead, it twisted into something different.
Just like most things cursed by the touch of a vagabond fox.
The response genuinely surprised me. Because remarkably, there is a person somehow proud of me. And of the things that I am doing.
But I am not sure I will ever accept that perspective. Because from the depths of these trenches, the view is shockingly different. I am forever caught in what is right in front of me. So bigger pictures often suffer. And there’s always so much more to be done.
I know that it is impossible to fix the forever. So I can only try to repair the now. But slapping silly Band-Aids on the thing that’s killing her only buys us so much time; we both know that it is going to win in the end.
But I refuse to let that define her; she is so very much more than a charted diagnosis.
So I will suffer in my silence. As men are taught to do. Because this is her story. And I want her to have the opportunity to experience everything unfettered by the thought of what she is leaving behind.
There will be opportunity later for all the grieving; there isn’t much time left for the conversation.
But I’ll give that to her, too.
Despite the cost, it’s the right thing to do. Because when it comes to her, this old fox still has some love to give.
And there’s still a chance…