I am writing this in 2025, and I can’t believe that I am about to talk about thriving when I consider everything that has happened. I’m not trapped in the past; I’m looking back to understand how everything changed — and how I changed with it. The story you’re about to read is not a shrine to a lost relationship. It’s an exploration of what connection looks like, what it offers, and what its absence can do to a person.

I had known Lynn had a lung disease from the beginning. The first time we were close enough for it to matter — lying together, kissing on her bed — I was already paying attention to her breathing. This was back in August of 1992, eight years earlier.

Not politely. Not abstractly. Specifically.

Does she need air? Should I shift my weight? Will she tell me if she needs to pause?

Because she had Cystic Fibrosis (CF), a disease that affects the lungs — I wasn’t simply being considerate. I was thinking about how CF might affect her breathing. I was attentive in a way shaped by love and awareness, not fear.

What surprised me, even then, was not fragility but steadiness. She didn’t need to pull away. Her breath didn’t falter. When she did need to stop, she said so — calmly, practically - wrapping an arm around me and letting me know. That became part of how we loved each other: awareness without alarm.

That pattern held for years.

In early July 2000 — the same month everything would unravel — we went roller skating. Anyone who has skated knows the effort it takes before momentum carries you forward. She did that without hesitation. Without stopping. Without gasping.

Nothing about that body suggested imminent collapse. Nothing suggested that within weeks she would need me to hold her because she didn’t have the air to cross a room. Even in private intimate moments passion told a story of strength, endurance and relatively strong lungs.

That is why what followed did not feel like progression.

It felt like rupture.

I didn’t know the monster we lived with — Cystic Fibrosis — was already tightening its clawed hand around the life we shared. I didn’t know how fast it could swallow everything we had built.

Our life had become almost like a routine but not in a way in which routine could remove the sense of awe. Even if we had argued earlier in the evening — arguing, never force — Lynn would finish her bedtime ritual, quiet and unhurried.

And then came the moment that always caught me a little off guard and filled me with a sense of awe, no matter how familiar it became: she would remove everything she had been wearing and slip into bed completely naked, pulling the comforter over her as she turned onto her side — a gentle, wordless invitation to come close.

I followed her cue, taking off my clothes and settling behind her, matching her curled position, cupping her breast, and letting my arms circle her as we breathed into the same slow rhythm.

It was our way of ending the day - comfort, serenity, and a closeness that pulled us both toward sleep.

I have heard the heartbreaking stories of women who must suddenly register the simple fact that the man they love is stronger - stories of awareness arriving at the worst possible moment. And it’s true: we are never more physically vulnerable than when we are naked.

But Lynn never hesitated. The way she settled into sleep each night spoke a different truth entirely: my presence beside her was a place of rest, warmth, and trust.

I would slide beside her, and in that simple act, loneliness itself vanished. For someone raised in a family where connection was rationed, where vulnerability was met with dismissal or disgust, those moments felt like a second childhood — one where love was not conditional, and safety did not disappear.

This is important, because the contrast is the heart of Part II.

For years, I had held onto a thin belief that my family of origin might care if something terrible happened. That maybe somewhere in the well I kept drawing from, even if it held only drops, there might be enough water to keep me standing.

I could not have imagined how wrong I was.

How deep that well truly was — not a well at all, but an abyss.

Later, when everything collapsed, I found myself shouting into that abyss the way Luke Skywalker calls out to Vader in Return of the Jedi — not symbolically, not poetically, but with real desperation. That was me. Crying out for help. Over and over.

Dad… Mom… Carrie… PLEASE. Help me.

And the silence that followed was colder than anything a fictional villain ever delivered.

I kept waiting for the moment when my suffering would become too much for them to bear — when the instinct any parent or sibling should have would finally break through.

It never came.

If you’ve ever dealt with someone who cannot feel what you feel — who cannot be moved by your pain — you will recognize what comes next. The void. The blankness. The chilling absence of empathy.

It is the heart of narcissistic toxicity.

And it is the reason survival sometimes requires walking away completely.

Part II begins at the moment the world tilts. When the monster you thought you’d outpaced catches up. When the life that grounded you is swallowed overnight. When the people you believed might steady you reveal that they cannot — or will not — see your suffering.

I survived what came next — the illness, the injustice, the betrayals, the slow erosion of identity — but survival is not the same as living.

Even so, this isn’t a story trapped in the past. I’m writing from a life rebuilt piece by piece, a life still unfolding. What happened in 2000 is long ago, yet what it shaped in me — what I had to survive and learn and unlearn — still echoes in the present.

Part II isn’t a love story. It’s the record of what it takes to survive what should have destroyed me, and what it means, even now, to keep choosing to live. To understand the depth of what I lost, you have to see what I once had — and how quickly it vanished.

And yes, life moved forward. I dated. In a time of confusion, I married someone, but that relationship wasn’t meant to last. Years later, I had a girlfriend who wasn’t meant to be either. These connections were part of finding my way, even when I didn’t yet know what “thriving” meant.

I’m building connections now — through poetry, through creative nonfiction, through friendships that grow from telling the truth. I’m not waiting for the past to return. I am opening to the life I’m creating, and I intend to thrive.

But things did not stay the way they appeared in the last chapter. Everything seemed stable, unshakeable, as if nothing would ever change — and then everything did.

So we rewind now, not to dwell, but to complete the part of the story that had only just begun to crack. Before you can witness what healing looks like in the present, you need to see the storm that nearly ended me.