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Moving On

This past 27th of September was my birthday. I don’t really care about the ceremony of it as I’m no longer a child who receives gifts. To me, yesterday, tomorrow, and today are just days. Turning 33 doesn’t change anything for me, it’s just another day. However because of the cultural expectations I wanted to spend this day with my daughter. I have fleeting glimpses of hope for what my life can be and I’m still figuring it out, but what I want above all else is to be a good father.

I promised my daughter I would take her to the zoo and eat berry dessert with her. Since my divorce I can hardly eat or sleep but I couldn’t betray my promise to Zelda. For several weeks I only slept four to five hours at most and I thought about not being there. Instead I woke up around four, drove two and a half hours north, picked up my daughter and spent the next four-and-a-half hours at the zoo with her, her friend, and her friend’s mom.

Afterwards she slept for a bit, but woke up with maybe only 30 minutes of sleep. I had asked my Ex to pick up some berry-tarts from a local bakery, which she did. Thank you X. Afterwards Zelda and I shared one, though Zelda ate most of it. I don’t like sweets but I promised we’d eat it together.

Afterwards I spent some time playing with Zelda and just doing anything to spend time with her. When she wanted to sit on my lap and replicate my pose I felt really happy.

Later her mom came home from what I can only assume was a date, we prepared a dinner for Zelda. I helped as best as I could as I don’t spend enough time with Zelda to know what she likes now (writing that line makes my heart bleed, I wish I knew but her mom makes it difficult to spend time with her). While she did like the broccoli I made her, she really was invested in eating it when I promised to read to her. People are always amused when I say I can keep a toddler’s attention for an hour with books, but I use onomatopoeia, different voices, and engage her with questions.

In the end Zelda went off to do her own thing and my Ex and I spent some time talking. It was the most civil conversation we’ve had since she declared she’d started a divorce. It still hurts but I realized something recently.

I’m better off without her. She is selfish, non-empathetic, hyper-focused and apathetic to my plight. If I criticize her she gets angry. If I tell her she hurt me she plays UNO-Reverse and says its my fault. When I expose my vulnerabilities she just gets angry with me. So I just drank my pain.

She’s not a bad person inherently just selfish. As I’ve come to understand this, the love I’d held for her for over decade has started to fade.

I’d known she was like this the entire time, I just hoped she would change. It was during a trip in China to visit her family for Zelda’s first birthday I realized I didn’t mean much to her. I felt so alone and ignored. She didn’t understand when I said wanted more time with my daughter as everything was following Chinese traditions. I don’t know those, I’m not a part of them, I just felt like an outsider. It was just months of pain being an outsider, and she didn’t try to help. I even told her but she didn’t understand or care.

It’s this accumulation of apathy towards me I’ve realized she’s just not worth loving. I hate this. I hate that I feel I have to write this, but she ignored me and I loved her with everything I had. In the end it’s just a sad story.

More Useful Than I Think

My last post, Less Useful Than a Paperclip, has been deleted as it goes against the ethos of my intentions. I do suffer from depression and nihilism but I do not want to spread it, when I write I just want to spread understanding and hopefully good will. While finding my divorce was finalized has hurt me deeply I do not want negativity to pervade. It really sucks and I miss my ex-wife and daughter but that’s life, as Mr. Sinatra said. Life is not an easy undertaking but we all have our own cards to play and recently I’ve been misplaying mine and blaming the game. There is so much happiness and good to find, for most of us. It’d be disingenuous to constantly be so negative. For all of the pain and misery one finds in life there certainly is joy and happiness. I know not all people are as lucky as I am, I was born to a middle-class american family but striving for something better can avail something to everyone Srinivasa for example.

I’m choosing to write today because my last post is the least of what I want. I hope when you read my writing you connect to me in some small way and I do not want you to connect to my negativity. What I want is for all the world to be a good place, full of life and happiness. I’m naive so it is my nature. To not-so-subtly get to the point I apologize for giving in to my despair. Instead I started a Youtube Channel where I will be posting all child-friendly content. Mostly reading books and when I finish those doing puzzles and other similar content. If you’ve read a lot of my blog you know I have a drinking problem and other related issues but I will not allow that to bleed out into anything related to children. I have my failings but children deserve the best of us, and that is only what I will give them.

I hope whoever reads this has a great rest of their day.

A Proof of Concept

The fourth of July is most certainly a day of celebration for me. I am a dedicated American and believe that the democratic process can allow for change. This country is not perfect but I firmly believe it can become better. Though the fourth of July is more important to me for another reason. It is the day my daughter was born. She is what is most important to me. She is the reason I’ve been trying to pull myself out of the mire I’ve sunk into. Last year I missed her birthday as I was enduring probably the worst period of my life, coping with job loss, divorce, losing the woman I love, alcoholism, being pushed out of my daughter’s life, and trying to find a new home. I still regret not being strong enough to be there, if I were a better person I could have been there.

However, on her third birthday, I was there. I could be there for her. And it was a very good day. She seemed to have so much fun and verbally expressed that she was happy. Her mother did a good job organizing things and she deserves thanks. Zelda’s b-day was held at a Chuck-e Cheese, where she constantly darted between every game. She had some obvious favorites and was just enamored with the full-on stimulation provided. I was able to see the friends she made and their parents. All in all a good time. Recently I’ve noticed she always gets upset when she and I have to say goodbye, I wasn’t sure if she just didn’t want to or because she didn’t want to say goodbye to me. I was able to get a definitive answer as I explained “Baba is going home in this car, and Zelda is going home in that car”. She wanted to go with me as she understood I was not going to her home. It was the purest definition of bittersweet as it made me glad she wanted to go home with me but it hurt so much to tell her she couldn’t and see how upset she was after.

Unfortunately what else I have to say is more about me, because I have just recently finished a move from Indianapolis, Indiana to Fresno, California. It’s been about three weeks and I’m finally settled in. I did this to be closer to my daughter and this birthday was both a really good day and a proof of why this was the better choice I could’ve made.

I rented a U-haul and drove four hours north (thanks to traffic) to pick up my things from my wife’s. Spent a few hours packing, then drove home around midnight. I got home about 3 am and unloaded the van by 4 am and promptly went to sleep. Since then I’ve been organizing and putting things in their place, getting groceries and whatever else I need. While there’s still some tidying to do everything is just about done. Now it’s a matter of living on my own for the first time in my life at the ripe age of 32. In fact since high school it’s been one of my dreams to just live alone. Like most dreams the romantic vision and the reality aren’t congruent but it’s still good.

Going forward I need to get a job, keep going to AA and figure out what visiting with my daughter will look like. It’s a little scary especially being unemployed but I have hope things will work out. Hope is not something I’ve had a lot of in the past 18 months. Anyways this is just an update to what a next chapter in someone’s life can look like.

It’s Not All Bad

This is meant to be a follow-up to my previous post, The Next Chapter. I’m worried it came across as too defeatist or negative when it was just meant to be a frank look at my situation. It should also be noted that my situation has been rapidly changing over the last month or so, and where I was when I wrote that is quite different from where I am now, mentally at least.

For the first time in probably a year and a half I’m hopeful for myself. Not because I believe my wife and I will get back together, not because anything has improved in regards to my relationship with my in-laws, and not because I’ve finally landed a new job. In fact none of those things are true but because I’m able to start living on my own terms. My wife is even reluctant to let me spend time with my daughter which is both frustrating and painful. However I’m no longer stuck in a quagmire of hurt, struggle, disappointment, self-doubt, and hopelessness. I am still hurt and struggling and disappointed and so on but I’m not content to stay there. Tomorrow may not be a better day or the day after that but I’m determined to keep moving forward until I do get to be genuinely happy again. Without change I will just slip into an abyss of self-destruction and no one wants that, most of all I do not want that.

When I finally move into my own home, or apartment if you want to be technical, I plan to set aside a corner of things for my daughter. That way I’ll have a visual reminder of what I’m fighting for, why all this pain has been worth living through. The future is uncertain but I can’t let the natural chaos of life deter me from experiencing the beauty that can exist within it.

In short, life is difficult but if I don’t work at achieving something better for myself I’ll never have that and I believe I can do that work, I trust that I can do what needs to be done.

The Next Chapter

For almost a year now I’ve been living at my parents home recovering from a painful divorce and an ongoing battle with alcohol addiction. If these two occurrences were characterized as wars I’d be losing both. Most mornings I wake up hating myself for being as useless as I feel, an unemployed father who can’t be there for his daughter. I feel like a leech attached to those I love, stealing from them just so I can slowly rot away with no purpose. Due to my inability to fully heal from my wife leaving me and change my drinking, my parents have decided it’s time for me to move onto whatever is next for me. I agree. I’ve been wanting to be on my own for a long time but didn’t trust myself to do the right thing. So I have two options: 1. Check myself into an in-house care facility or 2. Find my own place. I am fortunate that I have money saved up from my time as a Software Engineer that I could do either. As a result, because I’m just ready to move on, I bought a car and applied for an apartment closer to my daughter (who lives on the other side of the country). I’ll be driving out there soon and then I’ll try to find any job out there. Its the riskier option but I’m tired of feeling this way and the only real path I see to move on is to do what I want to do, not what other people want me to do. I’ve spent most of my life following directives from others. If it wasn’t my parents it was my wife. For the first time I can just do what I want.

That doesn’t mean living alone in a drunken stupor where I’m not directly impacting anyone, it means being self-sufficient and responsible for myself. I’ve been in therapy, psychiatric care, working with an addiction clinic, and attending Alcoholics Anonymous which are all useful tools for someone in my position and I encourage anyone who feels a similar powerlessness to use them. AA specifically is free and provides a lot of support and community for alcoholics and will be the one thing I continue with going forward. Once I’m in a better position I can be involved in my daughters life again, the only thing that’s been keeping me going. Despite friction between my wife and I, I’m determined to make sure I am a good father for the person I love most in this world. Right now I may need her more than she needs me but one day that will change and I will be able to proudly support her.

Bottom line I’m not in a good place but I can’t give up no matter how much I want to sometimes. I just need to keep moving forward.

Happy Days

I’m so exhausted from writing heartbreaking anecdotes, instead I’m going to write about something wholesome and happy. First off I’m no longer unemployed, it’s nothing grandiose but it’s a job. Onto today’s subject: I had the pleasure of my daughter spending a few months with my parents and I in Indiana last year through the new year.

My mom converted her craft room into a room for Zelda replete with her own bed, shelving, and a chest to store all of her clothes, books, and toys. Not long into her stay we went to a nearby second-hand store for children’s things and got some puzzles, books, and her first booster seat. It was fun watching Zelda run around and seeing what took her interest. She loved her booster seat which had the Paw Patrol as a motif, she loves dogs in general. There aren’t any in her home with her mom but my parents have two dogs and my sister who visits frequently has her own as well. Nearly every time we video chat with Zelda she wants to see everyone including the dogs. The group being together is important to her.

While here we would always spend our mornings in the living room where my parents watch the news everyday. Zelda would get her morning milk (chocolate milk if we had it) and we would draw, work on puzzles, play with toys or whatever she felt like doing that morning. If we drew she always wanted me to trace our hands next to each other on paper and tell me which was which. Baba hand and Dada (short for Zelda) hand. After my parents finished with the TV I would let her watch educational children’s programming like Numberblocks or Ms. Rachel for 30 minutes. I like to watch it with her so I know what she’s being exposed to, but would also take advantage of her distracted attention to prepare her breakfast. After breakfast I would always encourage her to go outside, though Indiana was quite cold at this time. She didn’t always want to and that’s ok. She did get to go sledding a few times and we even attempted her first snowman, though it was too cold for the snow to stick. We’d brush our teeth together every morning and she always wanted to imitate my brushing technique, then I’d help her finish. She did catch a cold and she and I developed a habit of taking our medicine in the morning. Baba medicine, supplements and anti-allergy pills, and Dada medicine, honey-based supplements for an immunity boost.

Around this time, I would practice her numbers 0-20 with her and then her alphabet. By the time she left Indiana, she understood 0-20 and was even starting to draw them herself. Letters were a bit more difficult, but she did learn some. Then, it was time for her midday nap. However, she almost never napped during this time, I believe it was because the room didn’t have blackout curtains. Instead, this became unsupervised play time, which is ok as long as she seemed healthy. Pushing for midday naps isn’t always necessary. Sometimes, when I would check on her, which was every 15 minutes, she would look at me with a wolfish grin saying “No, no, no” because she wanted more time to herself. After her nap was more milk, followed by more playtime.

One thing we had setup was a large box with windows and an opening for a door cut into it, with the folds taped for increased structural integrity. By the time she left it was covered in colors, words, and drawings. She’d dump her crayon bucket in there and just sift through the different colors, finding a favorite and scribbling into one of my notebooks. Or she he’d have me close the top flaps and jump out saying “BOO!”. Then she’d have a snack plate, play more, and have dinner with my parents. I’d allow her another 30 minutes of TV in the afternoon of whatever she wished. I think we watched Frosty the Snowman at least 30 times, eventually she had nearly all the dialogue memorized. Pokemon was a choice but she liked it too much and I didn’t want her to watch it after the first episode. She was going around saying “Pika, Pika!” for several days. Other things would be Bluey, Peppa Pig, nature documentaries, music videos, etc. I preferred music videos where she could see people playing their instruments.

To go to bed she had to have all of her stuffed animals, she really likes animals, all lined up in her bed with her “cozy” blanket, as she called it. Getting her cozy was a ploy I used to increase her comfort making her self-soothing to sleep easier on both of us. Sometimes I let her sleep next to me, usually when she was sick or if she woke up too early. Though she always wanted to sleep next to me, it’s better for her development if she doesn’t.

Zelda even had the chance to meet one of my friends and his kids as well as his nephew and niece. I spent the whole two hours chasing kids, being hit with pillows, playing hide-and-seek, and whatever else they all wanted to do. We both had a lot of fun, and it was my first time seeing this friend in-person in a while. It was after this Zelda started to warm up to my parents more as well, like a seal on her social openness had been broken.

Leading up to Christmas, she would make cookies with my mom, and I allowed her one cookie a day, usually split up as a treat across her meals. I used sweets and berries as incentives for her to eat her vegetables every meal. She did have her first big Christmas with us all, and she got to open her stocking of candy and small road-trip toys as well as several presents. I made sure she got a present “from” everyone, including her mother, her mother’s parents, and Santa Claus. One of her big presents was an all-wood kitchen set. Another was a marble run which I set up, and she loved the little colored marbles. She loves bath time, so one of my themes for her was bath toys, so she got all different kinds as well as a hypo-allergenic bath ball and bubbles. Watching her open the presents was great. She had no restraint and was just opening them one after another with no regard. After Christmas, we had a road trip to Virginia to meet my brother and his family. This was the first time she and my older brother had met, much to chagrin, but I was glad it finally happened. In Virginia, we spent most of our days at Busch gardens, which she really enjoyed. There were light displays, musicals, different foods, and plenty more. It was my first time riding a roller coaster in probably a decade or more. She also rode some rides with me and alone. In the afternoons we went to the pool and I’ve never seen her so excited. Her little limbs flailing like the propellers on a helicopter. She would intentionally try to jump in somewhere out of reach because she always trusted me to catch her, and she would slide in on her belly headfirst from outside the pool like seal.

When it was time for her to go we all had ice-cream sundaes the night before. It was a special night so she got a special treat. This was her first sundae with all of the fixings, a cookie, sprinkles, chocolate syrup, banana, and whipped cream. It was 20 minutes of audible expressions of enjoyment. Just “Mmmm” in various pitches as she worked through it. She didn’t finish it which is probably for the best. We all had a great time. On our flight out we watched movies and TV together. We couldn’t both watch on the same screen so I lined up the timing on our TVs so we were watching more in parallel than anything, but seeing this little head with my big beats barely fitting was pretty great. I had the volume turned way down for her. All in all we both had a ton of fun.

The Collapse Pt Four – Nadir and Terminus

I plan on this being my final post in The Collapse series and to avoid things I’ve already said, and to highlight happier moments there are a couple of earlier posts from in-the-moment I’d like to highlight. First is Life Comes at You Fast, where I go into more detail about what I was doing leading up to my daughter’s birth. Another from a month after her birth, A Liminal Space. And finally Tempus Fugit which focuses on the several months when I had parental leave from work. Again the topics below will probably be hard to read through. Anything I say about myself or others is only meant to draw out the points of how things can fall apart.

My daughter being born was and is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. Pardon the meme but her birth cured my depression, or at least my nihilistically driven existential dread. For the first time in my life I wasn’t afraid of how I ended. It also seemed like the best chance for me to prove to X how capable I could be. However my wife and I clashed on almost everything at this point. I didn’t need to put a lot of effort into my contract job and thought that we agreed I would take over day-to-day child care, at least to start. Except my wife wanted a live-in doula, which I was fine with as far as nursing her back to health following a 10-month pregnancy. But it was obvious she wanted to offload day-to-day care to other people, something I was and am strongly opposed to when it’s not necessary. Since we came home with Zelda, it was “let’s have a doula, let’s let my mom come out and help, let’s get this daycare, or this person to come babysit for a day.” She had no interest in being as hands on with our daughter as I did whereas I felt that was mandatory. Before I continue I will say, X put in a lot of time and effort in other areas like finding daycares, vetting them, and other more logistical tasks.

From hour one of Zelda’s birth I was there, I even cut the umbilical cord probably with the most worried look on my face I’ve ever had. For the next three days we spent in postnatal care I most likely only got about six hours of sleep while watching over X and Zelda. Then we had a live-in doula for about two months who took care of X’s recovery and took care of Zelda. After the doula left, I sleep-trained Zelda myself, which meant sleeping only a few hours every night for months, getting her adjusted to a regular sleeping schedule. Then getting her to sleep by herself. All while looking for new work and getting housework done (I was on parental leave from work). If you ask X I’m embellishing, but I don’t believe I am. For the majority of Zelda’s first two years outside of the doula and eventually daycare, I did nearly everything that required hands-on effort. Not to say X wasn’t present, she did spend time with her. It’s just that I was the primary caregiver for a long time. When I was in CA last and picked up Zelda from preschool with my wife, Zelda completely ignored her mom and ran towards me, I believe because I was always there. Playing with her, talking to her, reading to her, brushing her teeth, feeding her, taking her to the pediatrician, things X did just not as frequently as I did.

At a certain point I started drinking again. From my memory this was 8-9 months after Jekyll &Hyde. Longer than I’d ever gone sober before, not to blame her but she gave me an ultimatum, stop drinking or she would leave. I didn’t have the strength for either. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, no matter what it cost me, I just couldn’t afford it. So when I did start drinking again I didn’t want to tell her. She’d always been a taskmaster, if I was playing video games I felt the need to hide it because she would shame me for it. Drinking was worse, I couldn’t tell her or I felt my marriage would be over. I was not drinking a lot at this point. It was mostly beer, as I enjoy drinking it, and only a few at night after Zelda was asleep. Back at work I felt driftless as I was on a new team, learning several new services, but my team was struggling to keep up with stakeholder demands. I had very little time to learn from my seniors and worked over-time to keep up. Work alone was incredibly stressful but my wife was still pressuring me to find a new job. I still had to take care of my daughter. There’s just a lot to do at this point in one’s life. We still had our good times and things didn’t take a turn for the worse until well after Zelda’s first birthday.

Zelda turned one during a visit to her family in China and this was when I realized something I still haven’t found a solution to. When my wife is with her parents she doesn’t really spend a lot of time with me. Though we did putz around town on scooters together a couple times. When my daughter is with them she wants to be with the group. I was naturally excluded because of the language and cultural barrier so I spent most of this time in China working, studying, and playing games by myself except when I took Zelda out on my own. When I told my wife this she didn’t really seem to care. One could argue “Learn Chinese”. Sure, which I did. I even delivered a vow to my wife in front of her family and friends in China, in (imperfect) Chinese at our wedding ceremony there.

Fast forward to later that year when in late October I was laid off as a part of company-wide expense cutting. I think our marriage was over the moment my wife found out. Immediately she told me, if only I had gotten a job sooner this wouldn’t be an issue. I wasn’t completely hopeless at this point, I had a plan already laid out for the next 4-5 months to make sure I would get one, by the end of my first day unemployed. A week later I had a few beers for the first time in months and X and I argued. The next morning we separated. I moved out, into a nearby rental. We started couples therapy. The rental I stayed in was shared with several others but was affordable as a result. I stayed mostly to myself while I focused on job searching. After a couple weeks I noticed the house-mates all hung out on certain days on the back porch and started joining them. Problematically they all drank and/or smoked. So at first I started smoking here and there, then I started drinking again. X was ready for me to move back into the house until I showed up completely drunk one day. No fights, just obviously drunk. Now I moved back in, not because she was ready, but to keep me away from influence.

Things stayed relatively ok still, during this period, though our relationship had obviously very much cooled. We got into one argument since therapy and she immediately stopped the sessions. Zelda was in daycare and I focused on getting a job during the day. I was putting in at least 6, sometimes 10, hours every day studying and applying for work and attending interviews but nothing ever panned out. I did pretty well staying sober having the occasional drink every couple of weeks but it was still enough for her to know I wasn’t in a good place, especially with all the failed attempts at a new job. After several months of this, around April of 2024, her parents came to help with Zelda. It was after this I completely fell apart. Since X spent all of her time with her parents we didn’t do anything together anymore and X’s parents were always with Zelda so it was hard to be with her also. Again I was excluded by the nature of language and cultural barriers. I felt alienated, alone, and frustrated. With the only two people who had kept me going all this time seemingly taken from me or just avoiding me. So I kept to myself, worked on getting a job, and drank at night and sometimes during the day.

I still spent whatever time I could with Zelda but it was usually just her and I, intentionally avoiding my wife and her parents. This meant walking her to the park, taking her out to experience new things, letting her interact with things like keyboards and vinyl. To this day if you play the theme from Banjo-Kazooie she’ll want to dance or have me hold her and dance. My favorite day from 2024 was Father’s Day when I took her to another city nearby for the afternoon. We went to Michael’s where she could see all the pretty and colorful craft supplies. Then we walked around the main strip, got lunch nearby and had ice-cream together.

Eventually I came clean that I had been drinking again but with everything that had happened I could feel, any chance of respect, love or hope had died. Still I strived for it. This was the hardest part for me. I wanted to be close to her, but I had betrayed her trust too many times, and she had never respected me as an equal. I was fighting a losing battle, and stuffed those feelings into a bottle of Vodka. It became worse and worse over the months.

“Pray before the Altar of Needles
Worship in the Temple of Smoke
Whine at the feet of Surrender
Smile all the while as you choke
Because we are in love with the pain
That we keep coming back to
Again and again and again”

– Abuse Ritual by Black Tongue

It was after X told me she wanted a divorce that I hit my nadir and I had given up. I had become nothing more than a blubbering mass of alcoholic self-loathing, a miserable little pile of secrets. There were days where I’d just lay in bed, drinking, wanting to die. My wife was already irreparably hurt by me, but harming myself would just hurt my daughter too. I slipped further and further until my best friend started to come and check on me. My situation worried him so much he worked with my parents to have me leave. Something I should have done as soon as X’s parents arrived. This was a week before Zelda turned two. I still hate myself for that, but I’ll just have to live with that shame.

After moving back in with my parents I was served the divorce papers. It hurt, and still hurts, so much I took my frustration from that out on my wife when I was intoxicated. Blaming her for this and that from over the years. She went from being a friend to no longer wanting to talk to me. I understand now, after all this time, what I did to her, how I hurt her.

See this is not just the story of how my marriage collapsed but how I crumbled alongside it. Instead of showing strength I gave in to my weakness, instead of doing the right thing I gave up. Those moments where my determination was most required, I didn’t have it. I failed. I failed again, and again, and again. Because of that I lost my wife, my home, a friend, my sanity, the right to take my daughter to school everyday, and the right to live with her and watch her grow up. Above all I hurt everyone around me. I hate it, but it’s my fault so I just have to learn to deal with it and do the right thing going forward.

Getting this far has been because I had friends and family around me who loved me and still support me.

X if you read this and make it to the end, no amount of apologies will take back what I did but know from the bottom of my heart I’m sorry.

Take Me Back to Eden

Since my wife and I separated, the hardest part has been moving on. Unfortunately I still think about her frequently. Remembering all of the things we did, all the time we spent with each other. Cooking makes me think of her, hiking makes me think of her, certain TV shows and other activities, it’s the same. It’s all incredibly painful. I sometimes even see her in my dreams at the most random of times and places. As much as I want to be able to get past this, and find peace and give her peace, it’s been difficult. Part of it is that she’s the only person I’ve seriously dated and part of it is that we’ve been a part of each other’s lives for 12+ years. It’s probably even more complicated than that, but I don’t want to think about this any longer than I have to.

The last time I saw her, she seemed like an entirely different person than just six months ago and I’m glad she’s been able to change for the better. Walking through her house, all the signs that I used to live there are largely gone. I imagine it was painful for her to move on as well, and I didn’t do a good job of making it easier. All of those remembrances are of a person who doesn’t exist in the real world anymore, she only lives in my head. Maybe that’s the hard part, that image of her has to disappear for me to move on. I even asked her to make sure I know there’s no hope for us. Writing my “The Collapse” series made it clear that as we are, a healthy relationship between us is impossible. I know I can move on, I know I should but still I struggle with it. So I’m looking into healthy ways to move on.

There’s nothing great or profound that I want to say. I just had to get these thoughts out of my head. Yesterday and today were particularly difficult. I believed that together we would raise our daughter, see more of the world, eat delicious food, experience all of the good and bad of life and grow old as a pair. To share our love. That’s not going to happen. I have to accept that. It’s not a choice, it’s a requirement. I just wish I could take a magic pill that removes all of it without all the pain and depression. Eventually I’ll get there, I just hope it’s sooner rather than later.

“Some folks can lose the blues in their hearts
When I think of you, another shower starts
Into each life, some rain must fall
But too much is falling in mine

Into each and every life, the rain is bound to fall
But too much of that has started fallin’ on mine
Now into each and every heart, some tears are gonna fall
But I know and you know, someday the sun is gonna shine”

– Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall by Ella Fitzgerald and The Ink Spots

My Top Five Video Games

Everything I’ve been writing recently has been really heavy and emotional and I need to work on something a bit lighter. Somehow though I’ve managed to pick something that still leans into the dark, gothic, and dour. Alas, what can one do? No matter, it’s nice to not write about the complicated things. In no particular order these are what come to mind when I think of my top five favorite games ever. I’ll add a bit of justification, gushing, and some criticism where necessary.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

My fascination with SotN started watching my older cousins play through it at their home, and eventually I was allowed to borrow it and play for myself. It quickly became one of my favorites. No game before had combined all of it’s elements so smoothly for me. The music is nigh perfect, the UI is spectacular, SFX are spot on, and the graphics sell the whole gothic package with gameplay that rewards exploration and experimentation. It is truly a masterpiece in my eyes. I’ve probably completed it over a dozen times across multiple platforms, and is first on my list of things I wish I could experience for the first time again. It’s biggest downfalls are that it’s incomplete and can be way too easy without self-imposed restrictions.

Dark Souls

I once described this as 3-Dimensional Symphony of the Night, and I stand by that. While tonally there’s a huge difference, the gameplay expectations are actually pretty similar. Explore, fight, experiment, and improve. It has one of the most interesting game worlds I’ve visited and easily one of my favorite combat systems. While the music is understated and more ambient, nothing compares to hearing the Fire Link Shrine theme, or struggling through a difficult section and hearing the burst of flame from an ignited bonfire. Whether remastered or not very little compares to Dark Souls 1, not 2, 3, Elden Ring, Sekiro, or Bloodborne. I’d include Demon’s Souls but I haven’t played enough to comment.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords

While I could’ve put KotOR 1 on this list, the gameplay opportunities and writing make this a better replay for me. Character builds are a lot more loose allowing for some weird but satisfying approaches to breaking the game in your favor. Not to mention the characters’ and their writing is just some of the best, with nuances according to player choices. One could probably write a book on Kreia’s philosophy alone.

Vampire – the Masquerade: Bloodlines

No other game has made me feel like I was in a different world more than VtMB. From the music and ambience to all the different characters you interact with and the different places you can go. Not to mention that the first time I finished a play through of this I was in the LA area. It certainly has it’s weakpoints particularly it’s lack of polish and bugginess but when I want to live in a dreary rain-soaked slice of southern California replete with Vampires, Ghosts, and Werewolves only one thing satisfies.

The Elder Scroll V: Skyrim

I considered cutting my list to just four entries or putting something else here entirely like Fallout: New Vegas but Skyrim, despite it’s action-focused-not-as-much-of-an-RPG slant, does something no other game does. Like VtMB, Skyrim takes me to another world but unlike VtMB this one isn’t gloomy and gothic, but fantastical and fun. There’s a broad palette in Skyrim including gloom but the idea of living in a fantasy world of sword & sorcery has never been so fully realized as it has in Skyrim. Like all games it has it’s issues but what it does right, it does so more than anything else.

The Collapse Pt Three – Fractures and Faults

Upon reflection I realize it may be obvious I have a lot of privilege, growing up in a middle-class family, and as much as I want to be relatable I won’t always be. I will not tailor my words for the sake of relatability but I will acknowledge that I am incredibly lucky as far as what struggles I have to undertake. If any part of The Collapse series has been depressing to read or paints me as a pitiful person know that it only gets worse from here. My intention is not to lionize myself or indict anyone, this is just how I think my story is best presented. Also as a point of clarification, I refer to my wife in the present tense as “my wife” because we are still married but the divorce is guaranteed and it’s just a matter of time until a judge signs for the dissolution.

Shortly after the Covid lockdowns started my wife and I moved back into her house close to Oakland. She wanted to invest in more rental properties but out of state, so we started planning to achieve that. However she, thinking that I should also have my own rental property, insisted I buy a home in Arizona. My father is and has been a home builder for some time, so I grew up around old homes, new homes, expensive homes, and run-down homes. This imparted a different understanding of home ownership because I had an understanding of what went into their maintenance which to me is just a headache. Not that I didn’t want to own my own home, I just didn’t want to own a home in another state that I’d have to maintain. I told X that I didn’t want to invest in a rental property. She insisted. I said no. This pattern persisted every day over months, until in frustration I said show me the numbers to make this make sense. Fast forward several weeks and I was going to buy a house in Arizona. The passive income is nice, in the winter at least when it covers the mortgage and utilities, but I still really wish I had kept with no, it’s such a pain dealing with maintenance, HOA’s, lawn care, utilities, management companies, local taxes, licensing, negative reviews, and extraneous expenses (like a new AC unit) for a house I see once a year at most.

We planned to start from my native Indiana, staying with my parents before going to Colorado then to Arizona. Initially we were supposed to stay in Indiana for at least a month but my wife has never gotten along with my parents which is a can of worms I don’t even want to look at. It was while we were there I bought my first car which would become our chariot thenceforth. So we left after only two weeks for Tennessee where she had found a rental, something I also didn’t want to do but I understood it was difficult for her being in Indiana.

So we stayed at an in-law unit at a rental in Tennessee which was basically just an office, a bathroom, and a bedroom. We were both working remotely at the time so day-to-day we just focused on work. Except my work team was going through a shift in focus and I had basically nothing to do for several months. I still diagnosed and fixed bugs, improved our testing, and wrote documentation but I was just finding work to justify my paycheck. I again became depressed and started drinking beer to pass the time. I became so stressed from my lack of work and the disorganization of my team I asked to be let go from my contract but they offered a raise to keep me on, which I accepted. X would go on to fly from Tennessee to Colorado where the first of her new rental homes was. I drove. It was a great drive, I think I cleared the whole ~1,300 mile trip by day four. I started out listening to music but after a couple of hours switched to an audiobook of The Lord of the Rings. I think I got halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring throughout the whole trip.

Colorado started out fine. We stayed in a rental for the first several months through winter waiting for her first rental to be ready. I even remember picking up a large sushi platter for New Year’s and celebrating with her. We were still having fun together.

Months later we eventually moved into her new home, we got furniture and lawn care setup before the heavy winter came in, resulting in our garage actually being completely full of cardboard. I mean floor-to-ceiling almost-spilling-out-when-the-garage-door-was-opened full. But it was here I started drinking more heavily. Same issues with work and feeling like I didn’t have a lot to do. It wasn’t really bad at first but all bad habits can start small. I remember thinking “If she’s going to do whatever she wants then so am I”. Obviously not a healthy thought. Almost every night I’d head to the den and stay up drinking and playing Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. We even started sleeping in separate rooms because we didn’t do much together and our schedules were too different.

It was in the second rental property in Colorado where things took a hard turn for the worse. Between the constant travel, setting up the homes, doing most of the cooking and cleaning, working, studying, practicing coding, looking for new work, and saving up for a down payment I started to drink even more. I kept up with all my responsibilities but we were both busy and she didn’t seem to really care about what I was going through so I drowned my feelings in a bottle of Jack Daniels every night. We were in Colorado so we did all the fun Colorado things outdoors. We even attempted some 14’ers, but I was too out-of-shape and overweight to finish one. My drinking gave rise to arguments between my wife and I, prompting her to request I attend therapy for anger issues, which I did. I’m not with the same therapist but I am still in therapy.

When my mom, sister and her partner visited us we went white water rafting for the first time too. Again tensions between my wife and mom existed making some moments uncomfortable. By the time they visited I realized I needed to cut back on drinking and had done so tremendously. It was also while we were in Colorado that I correctly deduced my wife was pregnant when she got light-headed and fell after standing up.

It wasn’t long after this we bought my house in Arizona, which was a great deal of stress for me and completely depleted all of my savings. We moved in and started the whole “setting up the rental” process. However I felt incredibly pressured by my wife to find a new job, complete with a pay raise, while doing everything else too. Groceries, cooking, cleaning, property maintenance, working, studying, and applying for new work. My telling her that I only had so much time and energy to get things done just pissed her off. When after months of hard work and I still had no new job, I became depressed again and told her as much, but it just pissed her off. Whereupon she shamed me for having these feelings. This is in my mind where the true cracks in our relationship became obvious. We were both going through a lot, especially her at the beginning of her pregnancy, and we had a hard time supporting each other in the ways we felt we needed. Neither of us was getting our emotional needs met. I did everything I believed I could do but every misstep or sign of weakness upset her. She also became depressed and was in her own dark place. Things didn’t stay this way but it was a portentous period, indicating what would happen if we were put into a similar situation again. My not-drinking was much better but there was a night I drank way too much, leaving her feeling overwhelmed. Eventually we moved back to California so she could deliver our daughter somewhere more stable, somwhere close to her first house.

For the sake of levity (I hope) I will share that one day we came home to a crossbow bolt sticking into our front door. I’m not joking, someone had shot a crossbow through one of our windows, into the house, into the front door so that the head of the bolt was visible when approaching the door from outside with the shaft inside. This is funny because no one was hurt and we only had to replace a window and door. I have a suspect in mind but didn’t think either of us were in real danger so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I even told the police who I suspected but there’s not much they could’ve done.