(First a heads-up trigger warning – I talk about suicide in this one. I don’t want anyone to be blindsided and I don’t want to cause harm. There is hope to be found here, at least. Like always, this the first and only draft, as raw as I feel, and there are no otter breaks)

I don’t cry as much anymore. I really don’t cry at all, maybe a couple of times in the last few years. The tears are there, close by and ready at a moment’s notice if I allow myself. There’s a door in my mind – my preferred metaphor I guess, as good as any – marked Julienne, and the tears wait right behind it, along with all the joy and memories of our life together, the presence of her hand on the back of my neck as we drove somewhere, the feeling of Being Complete brought by her head resting in spot between my chest and shoulder, the details and feelings of a lifetime of love squeezed into the years we were allowed. All of that is there, behind that door with her name carved (a little crudely – my carpentry tends towards the simplistic) just above the stylized nightingale and the Feanorian characters that say “he called her by her Elvish name”, just like the tattoo on the back of her neck. Everything we were is behind that door, and I know that I can walk in anytime and the tears will flow. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll think, or maybe the day after that.

Compartmentalization has been my coping mechanism since I was 7. I didn’t know at the time that’s what I was doing, obviously, but I’ve since learned that. I may even have talked about it on here before (I don’t reread my words generally). There’s a whole bunch of doors there, each stuffed with the memories and pain of that particular chapter of my life. The first era is Dad of course, and the earliest memories of life with that abuser are stuffed away there. There’s a door for the rest of my school years, one for the “college” years (I was not good at going to college at that age and didn’t graduate then), and one for my first marriage (a 19-year span). Behind those doors are the memories of the people and places and times of that particular chapter, and once that door is shut it is sealed. 99% of the time, I stop talking to the people I knew during that time period. The Alan they knew is gone, the Me That Was stuffed in that room along with everything else from that era, and he to me is a distant reflection in a mirror, some guy who didn’t know what the fuck he was doing but tried.

Sorry for this navel-gazing bullshit. I just feel like some background is necessary so that what comes next makes some sort of sense, if anything makes sense anymore.

I’m writing this for a few reasons. The first is I want to, which is a big deal to me because I haven’t wanted to write anything at all for a long time. In a very real way, I feel like I’ve said everything I want to say to this world and the people in it. I don’t have any more stories (well, except this one, I suppose) to tell, or at least I’m not longer capable of telling them. I don’t talk much anymore. I have a small handful of friends that I’m still capable of maintaining and none of them live near me, so outside of work I only really talk to my dogs. I’m trying to change this, which I’ll get to later, but that’s my reality, one I created. So wanting to say something is a novel feeling nowadays.

The second reason is to let the people who found me here and cared enough to follow the story of my and Julienne’s life together that I’m alive, if not well. There are more of you than I ever thought possible, and I still love you so much. You’ve been behind that door as well, and I’m sorry about that. I know some of you worry about me and I don’t ever want that, but me saying that doesn’t change how people feel. I’ve been trying to see if I can at least crack that door open, so the memories of love and joy with Julienne can brighten my life without breaking me down, and also so that the love people have for us still can maybe reach me now. We’ll see how that goes.

The third and final reason is to mark a moment which is occurring now. This month I reached a milestone, one wrapped in barbed wire that tears me up as I pass it by. Julienne has now been gone longer than we were together.

I sat for a while just reading that last sentence over and over. To convey the weight of pain and sorrow and grief and utter defeat those words carry is beyond my skill now, if I ever had it. When the best years of your life – and in many ways, the ONLY good years of a life – are farther away than they lasted in the first place… well, that creates a special kind of despair, a feeling of utter defeat and heartbreak and just an overwhelming feeling of why-the-fuck-am-I-still-trying that makes everything feel so fucking pointless, a going through the motions that permeates every second of every medicated day, that makes every morning an unpleasant visit from a life that demands things from you that you aren’t receiving in turn, just a long fucking trudge through performing the necessities of life enough to keep food and shelter just to make sure that three dogs are getting the best life I can provide for them.

Sorry about that. It’s been a while since I’ve tapped in to these emotions and let’s just say there’s a lot of them.

So yeah. In a couple of weeks the anniversary (god I hate that fucking word) of Julienne’s passing arrives. Five years. Five fucking years. I try not to mark that day, but that day has sure as fuck marked me so here I am, trying to drain the poison inside through these words hurled into space in the hopes of achieving something I don’t honestly want a lot of the time. The ability to keep going, one fucking miserable fucking step at a fucking time.

Yes, I said something about hope in the beginning of this. There is some, I promise. But that comes later. Cracking open this door means a lot of bad shit comes out first, since that’s the shit that claws at the door the most.

I guess I should catch you up on the last five years. The first year or so you probably know, if you read through our story. I muddled along in a daze in the months following her death, going to work, posting pictures of her on Instagram pretty much every day with pictures from that same date, along with stories behind them, like a visual companion to the writing I did here. I wrote, of course, telling our story here, right up to the moment before our wedding, then closing with her funeral and the days after. Then as you know Covid hit, and from March 2020 to October 2021 I was alone with my dogs, working remotely and slowly going insane.

Maybe slowly is being kind. I do think that the pandemic made a lot of people crazy and the world hasn’t recovered, but I can really only speak for me. I lost my mind, to be perfectly honest – haven’t entirely found it either, but what are ya gonna do – as those days of isolation and living inside my headscape dragged on and on. Things (and when I say things I guess I’m just referring to my insanity) accelerated quickly after I finished writing about the funeral, which if I remember correctly I posted roughly a year after Der Tag. After that my words left me – no, that isn’t quite right – after that I stop wanting to speak, to anyone about anything. In January 2021 I came out of my despair fugue state (I might have written about that here – the years haven’t improved my desire to go back and verify) and started to try to build a new life.

I didn’t know what I was doing, of course, since no one really knows what the fuck we’re doing and we’re all just impostering our way around life hoping for the best. I fell in love, or at least something that approximated it (and sometimes that’s the best we can do). That feeling got me to finally act on the circumstances of my life that were killing me faster, which was living alone in the home that Julienne and I created together with love and hope and joy and defiance. I was truly a ghost that haunted that place and I knew I needed to leave. I packed my things, alone, and moved them to storage facilities, alone, and bought a house in as middle of fucking nowhere I could find, and moved in with the person I had met, trying to make a new life in the woods of Missouri. I was still working remotely at the same place and was hoping that leaving the area would bring me some peace.

That was the moment I shut the door.

I no longer wore my wedding ring, of course, being in a relationship and all. The necklace Julienne gave me when she proposed was off too, the only two pieces of jewelry I wore tucked away in a shadow box beside the pocketwatch she gave me on the day of our (actual courtroom) wedding. In that box were the two fairy berries that meant the most to me (I wrote about them on here). The closing of that lid really marked the day I closed away that life.

Unfortunately that meant I closed away all of the people from that time. I was in a lot of pain then. I’d lost my desire to speak, to connect, to remember. To the people in my life then I just disappeared. I told almost no one where I was going when I moved. I wanted the Alan That Was to die – hell I wanted to just die and get all this shit over with – and be forgotten, except maybe for the story of two people who fell in love, a love that cancer couldn’t dent, a love that persevered and prospered and fucking flourished despite everything that came our way, a love that found joy in every fucking moment no matter where we were, whether it was in a chemo pod in a hospital or the palace of fucking Versailles or anywhere in between, but most especially in the home we made and that she called Derenemyn, a refuge from a world that had nothing good in mind for us but from which we clawed out all the life and passion and silliness and magic we could – and you better fucking believe it was a lot. God damn but together we shone like a thousand fucking suns, our light and life for each other and the Us we made in defiance of everything and everyone that tried to dim our shine. 

We burned bright, my Tinúviel and I.

In the absence of that light, the darkness was suffocating. I carried on as best I could, until right around this time in 2021, as I prepared to leave the world we’d made one way or another. That was when I stopped talking or texting or writing to anyone. I couldn’t keep the mask on any longer, the smile I wore to reassure them that I was “ok”, the illusion of hope. I wanted to die. I wanted to end my life by my own hand, in full awareness of what that meant in every sense of the word. I even knew how I’d do it. Thinking about killing myself was a constant presence in every waking moment – still is, just to a lesser degree now – and I longed for it. Even today, right now, I look forward to that day, the last day, the day I find out if I can find Julienne again in some way. That day will come, as it will for all of us, and I’m ready.

I’m still alive though, at least as I type this. There’s one reason for it, one solitary thing that keeps me here, keeps me getting in my car and driving to work (spoiler alert, I no longer work remotely) and paying my bills and keeping the mask on. I’m not alive today because I want to be, or because it’s what Julienne would have wanted (I’ve had people tell me over the years that Julienne wouldn’t want me to kill myself, but my response to that is true: she would forgive me, because that’s who she was, and she would understand). It’s not the medication or even the mantra that soothes me, a promise that I can always kill myself the day after tomorrow if I really want to.

As an aside, and if you’ve read me before you know how much I love asides and tangents and parentheticals, the day-after-tomorrow mantra came about from a song. Before that, it was tomorrow. The song “Going Wrong” by Armin van Buuren is a key reason why I’m alive today, and that’s absolutely ridiculous and true.

The sole reason I’m alive today is the three shitheads I share my home with. Lewis, Tali, and Waffles. I can’t leave them behind. It’s simply not fair to them. Julienne and I were their world, and without her it’s just me. People with kids often deride folks who describe their pets as being like children. They’re the closest thing to kids I’ll ever have. I’m alive today because I won’t abandon them. That means I have to live long enough to watch them die, one by one, each tearing out another piece of what’s left of my heart as they go, and I have to keep going through that on top of everything else until the last one goes to see if they too can find Julienne in what comes after. I have to fucking live through that, because I won’t leave them. That’s a heavy feeling to carry, but I carry it because I love them, and for no other reason. I love them and want them to feel that love every day for the rest of their lives, just like Julienne. I can do that at least. I hope.

So if you’re worried that I’ll die by my own hand, a) that’s valid, and b) don’t worry, it won’t happen until they’re gone, and c) the future is uncertain after that. There’s always hope, the thing with feathers.

So anyway, I moved to the woods in a futile attempt to find a new life. It didn’t go very well from the start, and the grand experiment died only 8 months after it began, in the most absurd way possible. Like the story of murder hornets during the pandemic, some things just come up that are so absurd that it feels like the writer in charge of life was just flailing for ideas. 

In June 2022, the company I work for got hit by a cyberattack that shut down global operations for six weeks. After it ended and we regained access to our systems, I was given a choice. I could come back or find a new job. I had one solid interview but didn’t get the job, so back to the office I went. I still own the house there, rented by my ex, and rent a place here, amid the world I didn’t want to be around, the places where everywhere I go I automatically know the fastest route to the hospital, the place where pretty much every memory of our life is. It’s hard being here. I’ll just leave it at that.

My life now is pretty simple. I go to work, where I have to be very interactive and social (I manage a bunch of people), then I go home and don’t see or speak to anyone until the next morning at work. I watch movies and play video games and hang out with my dogs. That’s been the near-total extent of my life, week in and week out, for almost two years now. Out of the last five years, I’ve spent 4 of those years alone with my dogs. I’m not sane, not even close, but I’m still kind, I’m still functional, and I’m still alive. I’m still quiet, but I’m writing this, so I guess I had a little to say.

I mentioned hope earlier, and nothing I’ve written has really demonstrated any. But I saved that piece for last, because I always want to leave you with something good, something beautiful if I can mange it, but at least something that carries forward the love I carry inside and want to share with the world. I’ve actually found something that I want to do, something that is exciting and interesting to me, and neither one of those feelings have had a place in my life since the world lost Julienne. It’s a little something, but little somethings sometimes mean everything.

A friend – one of four I’ve been able to keep – approached me after the isolation stage of the pandemic in 2020 about a short film he was making and wanted me to be a part of. I was interested and agreed, because I didn’t want to disappoint anyone. I was less sane then than I am now (which is saying something) but I did it. It ended up being a really good experience, but one that got drowned out by all the rest of the things happening in the world and inside my head. It was a bright day amid the darkness, but was consumed by the darkness on both ends of it.

In February, that friend (his name is Jeff Harvey, and I love him) contacted me again. He had rewritten the script of the film he made and I was in (called The Savior) and wanted to see if I was interested in auditioning for the role I’d played before, which had been expanded. I was surprised to find that I did want to, like a lot. I auditioned and won the role in a short film called Torments. We filmed it over 3 days in May, and it was one of the best experiences of my life, and absolutely the best thing that has happened in the past five years. I met some amazing people, almost a family of odd ducks like me. I’ve been involved in script readings and talking about new things, and the idea of being an actor is so surreal but so absolutely exciting and energizing and fulfilling that it gives me that thing that’s eluded me for almost 5 years now, such a simple thing, a beautiful thing, the thing with feathers.

First the first time since Julienne passed, I feel hope for a future that includes the pain of the past but carries the love forward. I can see a life away from this place of memory and pain. I can see a future. That in itself is new.

I wear my wedding ring now, and her necklace adorns my neck, and she’s with me every step I take. These five years have been dark, but there is still light. I’m going to try to keep that door in my mind cracked, and maybe one day a part of our story will be on film, in some way that carries the light and love of Julienne Edwards forward forever. 

Thank you for reading this, and for the love and support you’ve shown me over the years if you’re old school, and for anyone whose first foray into my life is this post (christ, I’m sorry) I want you to know that I’m grateful for the time you took to learn about two people you don’t know, but who loved each other enough to shine like a Silmaril. I love you, whoever you are, and I will love you for the rest of my days and beyond even then. You carry the memory of Julienne with you now, and as long as someone remembers her, she can never truly die. Thank you. If you want to find me I’m on IG and Bluesky. Just look for a guy called Corrigan Blake. He’s a big Mass Effect fan and occasionally he talks about Julienne. He’s weird, and quiet, and definitely crazy, but he’s kind and loves dogs and loves you too.

Be good to yourself. You matter. I love you.