“You can come over and be boring with me for a few hours or so,” I texted to her just now.

The summer solstice came and went with little fanfare. The days rhyme but don’t repeat. My comfort in comprehensible narratives has started to fade as I realize I just don’t have a map to where I’m going, and through the most surprising of circumstances I happen to be in a relationship with someone who might not have a map, but has an enviable, dogged certainty. Every step on the path I find myself looking for signs to confirm each step is not crazy, is not dangerous, is not going to set me up for the biggest fall.

I am the Fool.

Though my most recent tarot reading (courtesy of the tattoo artist who did my Lilith tattoo) had me King of Cups (Reversed) with the evolution to upright. I’m fighting, ever more weakly, hope. Hope that life will be more bearable, that the echoes of trauma that my mind sinks into might become more few and far between.

It would be hard to hold any of this hope, truthfully, if not for my girlfriend. I don’t know how I got here, and I don’t know how long it will last, and I don’t know anything at all but I know that in my messy breakdowns and tears and crying and panic attacks where I dissociate and lose touch with the safety of now, she is still there without judgment, with arms to hold me, and a frightening, loving devotion.

I usually start composing my newsletter on Tuesdays, with hope of a Friday rough draft and a Saturday morning final and publish. Here I am, still working on last week’s letter, where this is a totally new version - at least the fifth - I’ve started. A self-consciousness creeped in, and a meta consciousness of my own ‘arc.’ I’ve used narrative to keep chronology of people and experiences in my lives, and just like with every fiction piece I’ve ever written, I came to the experience where I didn’t know what the character was going to do next.

But this time, the character was me.

It’s not that I’ve never had any adventures, because I most certainly have! Instead, it’s that curious experience of feeling like a character that woke up in a world built by a different author. Or maybe it’s simpler than that, maybe it’s that I’ve never been the sole author of my own story, and my story is also the story of everyone who has ever touched my life.

We visited Jon’s tree at Finnriver over the weekend. It’s showing stress from the heat and lack of rain, but has foliage now, and I hope that the rains that are forecasted this weekend will bring it some relief. The weekend was long and intense, with a gnarly panic attack one night, my youngest’s School of Rock end of season performance, and introducing my girlfriend to my kids, my friend (and family photographer), and my best friend.

The panic attack was contributed to, no doubt, by a small attempt to find a proper bench site for Jon in the cemetery before the solstice, and my girlfriend not feeling well later that day, leading to my brain convincing myself she was dying and/or dead. Having to deal with this kind of thing is so isolating. As strong as I am, it’s also so exhausting to handle the grief, the unexpected brain crashes, the day-to-day expectations of being a parent and homeowner.

And it’s so frightening when someone seeks to be of help, to be let in, to love through the mess.

And calming in those brief moments where you let it in.

The writers block was a hesitance to put this out there, a fear of judgment or admonishment, ostracism or abandonment. A lot has gone on during this ‘Year of Whatever’ and the 'whatever’ right now is what it is. It is that I now have a person who I see almost daily, who shares smiles with me and offers comfort when I feel absolutely unlovable.

I think most people I know are happy for me. At least I hope so. To say the least, the last month has been an unexpected plot twist, and I don’t know what the next week, let alone the rest of the ‘Year of Whatever’ will hold. I just know that right now I feel like me and the girlfriend are aspiring to be like a couple of rescue goats set to live our best lives up at Pasado’s Safe Haven. Just to hop around in the sunshine, leaving the pain behind.