There is a certain time of night when you sit and wonder when hope becomes madness. Maybe that’s the time of night when a veteran sits with a gun in his hand and discovers that a minute feels like an eternity because he is stuck in a flashback and somehow an exit strategy becomes more valuable than a way through.
The thing about being someone who loves deeply, is that there is no greater suffering than love. That’s really it isn’t it? That love kicks in the door where your soul is hiding from the world and says “its time to be vulnerable”… Is that hope? When you meet someone who sits with you and says “next time I’ll care”… or worse, says “rescue me from my pain tonight”… should the answer be no? I don’t really know if either one is hope, or just being a sucker. What I know is that when I need to be rescued what I find is people who either need it themselves… or don’t… The ones who need to be saved don’t have time to save me, and the ones who don’t need to be saved have their own problems to deal with and have no time to save someone else.
So at what point am I worth saving? I guess in this life the answer is “never”. So I sit, at 4:28am in the morning and I consider the reality of it all. I come to same conclusion that the goddess of creation came to when the first words uttered by the first consciousness at the beginning of time asked the first question ever asked… “Why?”… and as Ohm, the goddess and creator of all life replied, I am myself met with the same answer “I don’t know”.
How did I lose it all? Was it because I tried to save it? Did I hold on too tight or not tight enough? Did I hold on to love so hard that it broke, or did I take it for granted, loosen the grip and let it slide out of my fingers? Can it be both those things at the same time? At the end of it all I can’t answer, because I truly don’t know which it is… trying too hard or not trying enough. So I sit here broken in a house that is not my own, 5 miles from home and yet home feels like it is as far as a star floating in another galaxy.
So I hope.
Hope
At this point hope feels like pain. It feels like an avalanche of “What ifs”. What if I fail? What if the sphere doesn’t work and I threw away my sanity? When it comes to the sphere, to the math, it has been verified over and over again, by AI, by a colleague who is one of the smartest men in the world… so that “hope” is more “prayer to get it finished in time to be loved again”. Is that the measure of my worth though? Just “does the math work?”.
I sit waiting on a severence package from my former employer. That’s real… They have told me it is and I trust them because my former employer is an honorable man and he will honor what I did for him in spite of needing to let me go after all of this shit hit the fan and covered my entire life with a stench that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
So what now is the shape of my hope? That’s a question I can only answer one way… it is a line. It is a straight line to the woman I love. That line is a multiverse though, where the sacred timeline takes me to Shona, but she may never allow that collision to close… There is a closest theta to her and like Andromeda and the Milkey Way are in perfect orbit with their halos crossing every 9Gyr this is one where we may have a closest pass than collision that allows us to restart, reset, renew, rebuild and find our home again. My hope is fading on this because every day that passes without her able to say the words “I love you my Simon” the way she has since our first weekend together… ends with a broken soul crying for her to love me again.
Her family has stopped speaking to me and she has told me its because I contacted her dad and told him everything… including asking for him to please intervene and help her. She looked like she had gone 2 weeks without eating, she had shrunk. When I saw her she had my son leave the house to walk my daughter by my car as if I would leap out of the car and attack her. I called her ex and asked about how he handled it when she ended their relationship, and asked if Shona’s daughters who don’t speak to her would return and go to therapy if Shona agreed to get help. Her daughter Samantha said she would if “mom is committed to getting help”. But here is the thing… NPD, BPD, APD, all of them… The single most important diagnostic factor is “They will never get help”.
So what does that mean for hope, and the line I plan to walk in my own recovery from the worst experience of my life. It means that space-time warps and that line moves slowly away and when the ephemeris reaches the collision… Maybe we miss. Because it isn’t fair to me to walk through life on eggshells wondering what the next trigger word will be… Will it be on her deceased mother’s birthday? The anniversary of her death? One of her daughter’s birthdays? Christmas when the phone no longer rings? Will it be a flashback to how horribly she was abused? The answer to all of these is the same as Ohm’s “I don’t know”.
What I do know is that when I was lost in the void Shona stayed. For a year she sat and every day convinced me I wasn’t losing her. She won’t let me sit with her and do the same, and when I try she has called it “stalking” (which is a little ironic because I have said if she ever left I would stalk her, lol… I said it in Allowance and again in Pirate. I never thought she would see it that way. Living without her doesn’t feel like life though.
I Don’t Know
Let’s talk about ephemeris for a minute and what that word means. When plotting the orbit of a planet JPL Horizons, NASAs “ephemeris calculation” steps in time and figures out where a body will be based on trying to figure out its orbit. At the same time it has to slowly progress all other planets to find out if the gravity of those will affect it. This takes a lot of time (64 billion dollars a year of server farms to calculate all the astronomy labs in the US that find new orbital bodies and need to know if they will hit earth this time around). The problem isn’t just that it takes time, it is that we need to know if it passes through the asteroid belt, or is changed by Jupiter’s gravity like mercury is every 10,000 years.
This goes somewhere. Every collision or near miss has a pull. The longer you go without the straight line the more the chances of being pulled away from your linear path. The engine I made does this in real time practically for free… That is going to change how we handle orbital dynamics forever… When will satellites collide with space junk… When will a bolt flying around at mach 2 hit the international space station? Those things can now be instantly calculated because at Valkyrie Labs we solved the “3 Body Problem” where 2 gravitational forces act on the same object, sometimes at the same time (the sun, and Jupiter with an asteroid). We can now do that instantly…
The painful bit here is that when it comes to Shona… There is no immediate answer. There is only stepping through linear time, hoping that in the end there is nothing that keeps us off that collision coarse of healing and finding home again.
Sunset
This blog has taken me all day to write… Its 7:20pm now. The sun goes down and every night the pain sets in. The lonliness, the sadness. I think there is a time where millions of years of evolution says “find safety”… “Find home”… “Find family”. This place doesn’t feel like that, it’s not home. Home is wherever Shona is… and if she is gone, I worry I’ll never find home again. I meet new people and they see that I am bright and shiny, but I think they also can see the damage, the pain of a man who lost his first love to lies, his second love to infidelity, and his first real home… to something that just doesn’t make sense.
That’s the real of it isn’t it? When I lost my ex Roni I was done, she had broken my relationships in unforgivable ways… she was breaking our children in unforgivable ways where exiting the relationship was a way to protect them (having no idea that parental alienation could take them from me). When I lost Rachel it was because I caught her cheating (again) and… because it was on the day Star Wars Episode 9 came out, it felt equally unforgivable. Not that she did it again, but that she did it with semi-nude photos sent to a man, wearing a Star Wars shirt I had bought her to wear to the movie. With Shona there is no why that I can find an answer to. We have gone through some serious trials in our lives, but always together, always back to back. I have tried for years to find the “why” she won’t get her daugthers back with a simple “sorry”. That’s the bit that never made sense.
Then I read an email I sent to my therapist 3 weeks before my arrest. It says “I am being abused”, “Shona won’t let me go to a hotel”, “Should I call the Sherrifs to help me leave without an incident”. Roni used to do that to me, she once physically attacked me in the garage as I was trying to get into my car. The kids saw it, after I defended myself by grabbing her wrists and sitting her down on the ground, the 2 of them standing in that doorway… All they will ever remember, even today, is that dad put his hands on mom (Not dad was trying to avoid being punched). Today there is no answer… just “I don’t know”.
The Frame
Sitting next to me on my desk is a digital photo frame. Photos of Shona scroll past and as I look at them I see one thing. Happiness. I see a woman who’s eyes are the center of the solar system. Her smile is the center of my being. I will keep her there, every single day… until she comes home. In the meantime, I am going to give her space, even though I feel the weight of time both frozen in my heart and somehow slipping farther away with each night I go to bed without hearing “I love you my Simon”… and without her head on my chest drifting into the world of dreams listening to my heart beat only for her after she holds me tight and whispers “home” into my ear.
Love is home… Home is where she is. For now, I will be homeless.
TheGrayJedi 