And while I’m telling you what to do, please go read + restack my latest essay for I Write Out Loud:

Dana DuBois | I Write Out Loud

You’re Not Anxiously Attached. He’s Avoidant.

It’s a loaded word these days, attached…

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15 days ago · 14 likes · 6 comments · Dana DuBois

Love you mean it!

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Here are some of the essays we discussed.

Dana DuBois | I Write Out Loud

The Men Who Still Open Me

I have a collection of men I no longer date who still read me. Not metaphorically. Literally…

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2 months ago · 38 likes · 19 comments · Dana DuBois

Dana DuBois | I Write Out Loud

My Dad, Dementia, and the Things We Don't Forget

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2 months ago · 22 likes · 4 comments · Dana DuBois

Dana DuBois | I Write Out Loud

I Took the Shot

I’m on a Zoom call at work when I notice my iPhone vibrate and light up with “Dad Nurses” on the screen…

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2 months ago · 20 likes · 8 comments · Dana DuBois

Dana DuBois | I Write Out Loud

I Spent 18 Years Getting Her Ready to Go. I Forgot to Prepare Myself.

My firstborn daughter nearly died at 15 months old…

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2 months ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Dana DuBois

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Drink in hand, we covered a little bit of everything: beauty, burnout, astrology, and the strange energy in the air right now. We talked about low-effort makeup routines for real humans, favorite products that actually work, and why sometimes five minutes and a tinted moisturizer is all you need. As always, the tone was equal parts practical and witchy, with plenty of laughs along the way.

We also dug into the big cosmic shift of Neptune moving into Aries and what that might mean for the months and years ahead — confusion, creativity, spiritual growth, and the reminder that not everything is meant to be rushed or forced into clarity. You’ve been forewarned.

And I’ve been revitalized to take on the rest of my week.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in.

The three of us are gonna make this a monthly meetup around the New Moon each month, so stay tuned and get ready to manifest with us.

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It set a kind, relieved tone for the whole hour.

Once we settled in, I talked about my latest essay, My 14 Year Old Once Called Me Transphobic. She Wasn’t Wrong. I first wrote about this incident two years ago on Medium (here), and I thought I understood what the moment meant. Spoiler: I did not. Rereading it now, in 2025, I realized how much had changed since that car conversation, and what my daughter was actually trying to protect. So I revised it before posting it to Substack, and I’m so glad I did.

What I realized in taking on this rewrite is that the issue wasn’t about sexual preference or semantics. It was about harm. It was about humanity. My daughter wasn’t scolding me; she was modeling the moral clarity this generation carries so naturally. And I finally caught up to her.

Then we got into Medium, and I spilled the tea on some observations I had around how it monetizes. TL;DR: if you have a story boosted on Medium, don’t share it on social media until after the boost has had a chance to earn. External traffic is a boost killer, at least in my experience. It completely tanked my story from last week, Facebook’s Dating AI Tried to Send Me on a Date With a Man Who Didn’t Exist.

(So hey, if you’re a Medium member, please click through and read/comment on it!)

Today’s collective conclusion: Medium boosts are a mysterious, fragile ecosystem and I have absolutely learned my lesson. The chat comforted me the way only this community can, with equal parts empathy, righteous annoyance, affirmation. and a few jokes at Medium’s expense.

Running a livestream alone could feel like talking into the void… except today it didn’t at all. It felt like sitting in a room with friends. Even though it was “just me,” it never felt like just me. The chat kept me company. You all kept me company.

Lawrence will be back tomorrow. His mom is okay. I’m grateful Thanks to all of you who showed up so it didn’t feel like I was broadcasting to my own living room wall.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in.

Love you, mean it!

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I opened the morning broadcasting from a Starbucks in Bellingham because the hotel I impulsively booked for my daughter’s college tour turned out to be — according to Lawrence — a sex motel (look, the sign DID say “vacancy.”) The entire lobby was the size of a biscuit, the waffle machine oozed batter like a crime scene, and my daughter was still asleep in the tiny room. So I hauled my ring light into Starbucks and set up camp in the corner. The barista didn’t even blink.

Lawrence, meanwhile, gave an emotional update about his mom’s health: she’ll likely undergo a mastectomy in early December. She’s still raking leaves and ordering Lawrence around with her typical mama bear pragmatism, but you could feel the weight of it. We held space — and then, in classic TDWS fashion, pivoted to hex codes and morning light like two dorks avoiding tears.

From there the show spiraled (beautifully) into my late-night experiment with ’s now-infamous prompt: ChatGPT, tell me my blind spots.

And oh, it did.

Lawrence tried it live and it roasted him so hard he’s considered filing a workplace harassment claim against a language model:
“You treat every project like it’s on fire.”
“You mistake chaos for momentum.”
”You think you don’t belong at the table even when you’re running the table.”

YOU DON’T SAY.

It even nailed my tendency to confuse men’s oversharing for intimacy. Honestly? Rude.

And correct.

Then we shifted to our twin viral story moments:

• Lawrence’s resurfaced TDWS epsiode with Marlon Weems about reparations

• My BDE versus BDB dating essay

His post is blowing up weeks later because a Substack guy named Nathaniel wandered in to declare reparations “problematic” and Lawrence absolutely handed him his entire ass, politely and with citations. The chat was screaming. We all were.

We also talked about:

• Twitter’s brief, glorious leak showing half of MAGA is bots in Nigeria and Russia

• Universal Basic Income (your kids asking for “their UBI” monthly is iconic)

• GenX healing generational trauma

• Thanksgiving plans (including my Turkey Day Live show with and ’s all-day Live marathon to ensure everyone has company this Thanksgiving )

• Lawrence’s mustache and the hazards it poses during certain gay activities

• The “big dark” of Pacific Northwest winters

• And Wilco/Billy Bragg’s “California Stars,” which started playing behind me mid-show like the universe was DJing our feelings.

It was raw, funny, deeply human, politically sharp, and held together by the kind of friendship that carries people through big darks of all kinds.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in.

We love you, mean it!!

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Rituals emerged as a powerful way to enter that state—lighting a candle, playing ambient sounds, or simply opening a Word document in just the right light. These small, repeated actions become cues that invite the subconscious to surface and the words to flow.

I also shared my short story I Love You, Dieter Murphy, a science fiction piece that doubled as personal healing. Writing it allowed me to revisit a moment of loss and transform it on the page. That experience underscored how writing can act as a form of therapy—an opportunity to reframe memory and resolve old wounds.

The conversation also touched on inspiration and representation. Growing up, I devoured science fiction, but almost never saw queer characters. Today, I write them into my stories not only because it reflects my world, but because representation gives future readers the mirrors I didn’t have.

By the end, one truth stood out: writing is more than a craft. It is a hypnotic, healing process—a way to connect with spirit, memory, and imagination all at once.

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I invite you to check out the novel I am serializing here on Substack—Light Shines Through.

And if you are so inclined, please sign up for my Summer Pledge Drive, where you can become an Annual member for just $1!

Thank you , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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I also plugged my Summer Pledge Drive, where you can sign up to support my work for just $1 for a Lifetime Annual subscription: http://lwinner.substack.com/onedollar

And check out the first chapter for Light Shines Through here (handy nav links at the bottom of each chapter to keep reading!)

Lawrence Winnerman | SCIENCE FICTION

Light Shines Through | Prologue - João

João | August 2041 - Macapá, Amapá - República Federativa do Brasil…

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a year ago · 1 like · Lawrence Winnerman

Thank you , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , @drdrewdavies, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , for tuning into my live video with and !

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I was going to start this by saying, “It’s not like I’d always had a crush on Troy Wedinger,” except that’s the kind of lie that could only be made true if I finished it with “but that’s because it was more than a crush; I was madly in love with him, from the very beginning.” It’s the kind of lie I’ve been telling myself and everyone else for nearly ten years now.

And I guess I owe you that truth, because the rest of this is going to come across as hard enough to believe that I should play this as straight as I can. Which is a joke about how gay I am, but you couldn’t have known that yet.

I’m Deek Passamore, Jr., and one of the first ways I distinguished myself from my old man, Deacon “Deke” Passamore, Sr. was that I cleverly spelled our shared nickname “Deek”. He didn’t like it, but then we didn’t like each other much to begin with. Or end with, for that matter.

I’d met Troy in peewee football when we were both nine. We were from small, adjacent farm towns out near Warsaw, Indiana. He was from Wessup, and I was from Dolfang, and if you try to look those up on a map, you probably won’t find them because they were really that small. No-stoplight towns that were more corn and soybeans than people, you know? The kinds of places where two little boys could ride their bikes on dirt roads to get back and forth to each other’s houses, and not be threatened by anything more than a herd of deer or a big John Deere tractor. But by the time we were in middle school, we were in the same school building, and fast friends.

We’d have sleepovers at each other’s houses. We’d help each other with our chores. We schemed endlessly about how to get things done faster so that we could go to a game, or a movie, or just hang out at the small pond that was halfway between our farms.

When I think about Troy, I think about my childhood, and vice versa. He was so much a part of it, we might as well have been brothers.

When his mom died, he stayed enough nights at my house that it was like we’d adopted him.

Years later, when my Pa ran off—well, Troy’s dad didn’t become my replacement pa, but it felt like between us we had enough people to cobble together a little family, and that was something.

We talked about everything boys talk about, I guess. Football and basketball. Video games and movies, and comics. Farming, trucks, soldiers, dirt…. damn near everything except girls, or only in the most abstract way, if we talked about girls at all. None of that struck me as weird, not until we got to high school.

And even then, I suppose it took me a long time to tune in on the raging hormones that surrounded us, because by then, two other things had managed to distract me completely.

One of them was Troy, or more precisely, his body. When I tell you he was handsome, I think I accidentally diminish the meaning of words. He was stunning, transforming from a skinny twerp who I’d been able to beat at wrestling for years, into a 6’3” blond-haired, blue-eyed paragon of Americana manhood.

Believe me, I was not the only one who noticed. In fact, I think it was impossible for anyone not to notice.

Except Troy. I’m not kidding you with that; everyone in a five-county radius knew who he was, and yet somehow, he only had eyes for me. As a friend, and a friend only, I was sure at the time, but later events cleared me up on that, I guess. Just too late to do us any good.

We were Troyandeek, or Deekantroy, either way, but always one word together, more inseparable than Mutt and Jeff, my Grammy used to say, not that I knew that reference at the time.

But by the time we got to high school, after puberty had well and truly kicked in, something happened to Troy.

The rest of us were flooded with hormones, filling out and filling in and generally speaking becoming men and women, as hundreds of millions of our ancestors had done before us. And mind you, this was happening to Troy, too, him becoming the paragon of manhood I’ve already described.

But the second thing was that something else happened to him—and only to him.

It was like God turned on the hormones tap inside him, and then also leaned over and turned on the divinity tap to boot.

It’s taken me so long to write this down because I don’t know how else to explain it. It was like he radiated light in a set of colors the human eye can’t see, but longs to. The natural world could see it, though, and boy howdy.

I’m not just talking about birds and bees, but also literally—birds and bees. Troy would no sooner step outside than he could hold out a hand and have a bird land on it, happy as a clam to have found this human, chirping to him like it was delivering him the dark-eyed junco headline news, or the latest decisions from the high command of the common grackles.

One spring afternoon that was already warming into summer, I finished my chores and went over to his place, and I found him sitting out in the back forty behind his house. This was a hilly meadow that had a creek winding through it. His Pa didn’t farm it because it was too rocky and steep, and besides, the creek drew the deer, and that was a prize for hunting season.

He was just sitting there in a beam of sunshine, and I shit you not, he was covered in birds, and butterflies, and bees, and crickets. But not in a “human being ripped to shreds by critters” kind of way. More like he was holding court, talking to them, and this wise council of the meadow was consulting with him on matters of most supreme mundane importance.

He turned to me, sensing I was there, and smiled so beatifically that it was as if the whole Universe had fixed me in its spotlight and decided that I was the main character of the day. I’ve only ever felt that radiance a couple of times since, and almost all of them were with Troy.

The flotilla of critters rose off of him as one, and headed towards me, not menacing, but rather as if a charming parade of festival-goers had come to welcome the newest arrival. They touched on me briefly, a gentle hailstorm of quick landings and departures that left me swooning with a feeling of peace and welcome, and also a deep, melancholy longing, because as quickly as it all happened, it was over.

It’s hard to be a human and to finally feel that love and acceptance from the world writ large, and then to have it disappear just as quickly. Maybe most of us aren’t designed for that. Maybe that’s why some of us turn to ever-harder drugs to find that touch of joy and light, and then keep chasing that high.

I pulled him up off his feet, and he bumped into me in a rough hug, and a flash of white teeth, and we fell into conversation without ever addressing what I’d just seen.

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There was another time in the woods, early in our Freshman year of high school, a thing I’ll never forget.

We’d both been hunting a thousand times before that. It was Northern Indiana; deer hunting was a God-given right, so much so that our fathers had taken us numerous times when we’d been kids. The couple of dozen times that all four of us had managed to go hunting together was a remarkable feat, considering that both of them were gruff, cruel, drunkards who weren’t great at getting up and out the door early.

On this morning, Troy and I were huddled up in the blind together. Not in separate ones, which would have been better for hunting, but pressed close together in the one we both liked to argue was ours; it was a way to share heat, and maybe an excuse to press our bodies up against one another, just because.

We’d sat in silence through the dawn, and right as we were thinking it was time to head to school, this ten-point buck that everyone in the county was talking about wandered into view, as cool as a cucumber, thank you very much.

I flinched right as I was about to take a shot, and then again when Troy put his big hand on my shoulder, and told me with his mind that he needed to talk to this stag.

I think I stopped as much out of shock that I’d just heard my best friend’s voice in my head as anything else, and when I looked into his eyes, he gave a small nod that said, yes, you just heard me in your mind.

For the next twenty minutes, I watched as that stag walked right up to our blind and stood there looking at us. Troy climbed down like he was meeting an old friend, and I clambered down after him, graceless and loud, snapping a branch as I tumbled to the ground. I looked up to see both of them—the man and the deer—staring at me with bemused smiles that said what a loveable oaf.

They talked, and even as I write it, I struggle to say it another way, but I am telling you they talked for what seemed like forever. Foreheads pressed together, nickers and grunts from both of them, ending in tears. A man and a deer, weeping before me, as I stood there, stupidly thinking I didn’t know deer could cry.

At the end, Troy nodded to me to touch his friend, and with a trembling hand, I patted the side of the stag’s head. The creature pressed his high cheek into my hand, and once again I felt that struck by a lightning bolt of joy feeling flood through me and then fly away, nearly as quick.

As we walked out of the woods that morning, late for school, Troy turned to me and said, “We’re never hunting again, okay?”

I nodded, mute, still a bit bewildered. And it was OK by me. I didn’t love hunting the way my father did, and that moment with the stag with Troy had shifted something inside of me as much as it clearly had in him.

It continued from there. There are a thousand moments like this I could tell you about here, but they are all more fantastic than the last. They all seem to come forward as if they are dipped in honey, a golden sunshine dust glimmering across the surface of every memory I have of Troy.

Other people began to notice, and not just in assigning to Troy the nickname of “Golden Boy”. Girls, and not an inconsiderable number of guys, began to clamor to hang out with us—and Troy, being Troy, let them. I remember feeling a certain disgruntlement that I had to share him, but also a considerable amount of pride that even as Freshmen, we had somehow become the center of gravity around which the whole school orbited. Well, Troy had, and I was the far less radiant binary star that orbited him, and so by default, I was popular too.

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Football was where it all changed. Him and us. All of it, and I mean all of it, became too big to ignore. I think it’s when he realized it, too. How big it could get if he let it. If he chose it.

We were on the team Freshman year, a quarterback and center duo so compelling that we saw real playtime, and had everyone buzzing about Troyandeek, and how we were going to lift the Warsaw Tigers into the top tier of Indiana football.

And we did.

Sophomore year he was the starting quarterback, and he was magnificent. It took four games to get Coach Walthers to put me in as a starter too, but when he did, it was magic. And I mean it was literally magic.

There was a play in a late September game against the Brownsburg Bulldogs—the same team we’d go on to defeat for the State championships for two years—that changed my perception of reality.

I could give you the play-by-play, but in my mind, y’all don’t seem like the kind of people who need to hear that part.

What had happened was, halfway into the game, when it looked like we were down by three touchdowns and incapable of coming back, Troy suddenly knew how the rest of the game was going to unfold.

Coach Walthers had screamed at us at halftime. I don’t mean he yelled, I mean he screamed. At the end of the tirade, he laid a heavy hand onto Troy’s head and hollered “You’re supposed to be the damned Golden Boy, so by God, you’d better show me you understand how this game works!”

I saw the change. No one else did, but I saw it. A flicker of anger and determination crackled across Troy’s eyes—desperate to impress his own father for ages, now pressing that keen burden into the shape of Coach. And the flash. The download. The golden rainbow of information that flooded into my best friend’s brain while I was watching him.

I had to blink to process what I’d seen, and then look around the locker room to see if anyone else had caught it, too. To a person, the guys were looking down at their feet. Not even Coach had noticed anything.

I caught Troy’s eye, and he nodded at me, a glimmer of a smile on his face.

I’m still not sure how to describe what happened next.

We tumbled out of the locker room, all except for Troy, who walked out onto the field slowly and deliberately, his head held high, but not in an asshole kind of way. Like he was noticing everything. Seeing the colors in the air, and breathing in the information of the earth, the crowd, and the players.

He motioned to us to huddle up, and when the last guy completed the circle, a tingle passed through me. It jolted my nuts, sure, but it was more than that. Not sexual, but masculine. Predatory and sharp, but smart, like a wolf, or a tiger, I suppose.

I can’t tell you what he said. It was simple, direct, forceful…but what I saw, in my mind, was exactly how the rest of the game was going to go. Every call, every pass, every catch, every run. I knew the order of the next 50 plays of the game, from now until the end, when we would win 27-20—a massive turnaround from the half.

You’re expecting me to tell you it went exactly to plan, right?

It did, until it didn’t. Derek Roman, an asshole junior on the other team tripped mid-play with 6:30 left, and sprained his ankle. None of us had seen that. It wasn’t in the plan. He’d been screaming that Troy was cheating, and then, thunk, down he went and twisted his ankle but good.

In the moment it happened, we could have freaked out, but while the medics were attending to Derek, the rest of us huddled up around Troy, who, I swear to God had a glimmer to him now.

We closed the circle, and we received our new information. When the clock resumed, we finished every new play flawlessly. We won the game, 30-20.

The rest of this story might be about high school football triumphs. It would be easy to tell that story. Fun, even.

But that was just the backdrop. A flawless season for the rest of our Sophomore year, and all through our Junior year, up until the end. The state media was insane, and yet somehow we weathered it, even when we were on pace to go to Nationals that Junior year.

We didn’t make it, but that was because Troy told us we had to lose, and so we did, in exactly the way he showed us we would. The strange thing was, it wasn’t like we were being controlled. We could have changed the outcome of that game in a minute, but we all chose not to, because Troy was convinced that we needed to lose.

Afterwards, as we rode home in my beat-up old truck, I was going to ask him why, but, as had been happening a lot lately, he just turned to me and answered my question before I even asked it.

“It’s free will, Deek. We all get to choose how our lives turn out. Every minute of every day, we’re making choices, and God lets us. Because the Universe has a lot of things in it that could happen, and some that maybe should happen, or have to happen. But we always get to choose if we want them or not. Even when bad things happen, we get to choose how we react to them. How we deal with it. Most people go with the flow, but they’re choosing big and small things every day.”

He paused and looked at me full on, while I glanced away from the road to meet his eyes.

“If we’d won that game, a lot of things that only maybe could happen, would have happened, too soon. And the way I figure it, there’s no rush. I didn’t feel like we were ready for it yet.”

I nodded because it made a certain kind of sense to me. I’d seen the way the town and the media were starting to go crazy at the idea of National Champs. Troy was already a local celebrity, more than the Mayor or our Congress guy. And me too, just by being his best friend, and being in nearly every damn picture with him.

He patted my shoulder and squeezed it, and a hundred images popped into my head, most of which I didn’t fully understand.

The one thing I did get was that Troy had made this choice because somehow it added up to him getting to spend more time with me, and whatever his reasons may have been, that thought warmed my innards like hot molasses.

Things with Troy and me got more intimate. Not yet sexual, but intimate in the way that lovers can be connected. We ate nearly every meal together. He could usually tell what I wanted to do next, and we’d do it.

Lots of time that was just hanging around with friends, but we spent a lot of that long, warm Indian summer just him and me, tromping through the fields and meadows of Indiana, or driving my old truck just to see where the wind took us.

Everywhere we went, we met people. We helped people stranded by the road, or helped a mom with her daughter who had cancer. Sometimes it felt like we were knights of old, riding around in my truck, slaying junkyard dragons and helping fair damsels and dudes in distress.

I can’t say as if I’ve ever been happier in my life.

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At the beginning of junior year, a new girl moved to town. Her name was Marie Touchette, but because kids are assholes, she quickly became ‘Mary Touch-It’; even some of the teachers started calling her that, thinking that they’d had her name wrong to start with.

The thing was, Marie was a touch-it kind of girl. She loved her body, and to say that she loved men’s bodies too might sound like I’m being an asshole, except for the fact that I was kind of jealous of her. I loved Troy, I really did, but I was a horny gay teenager after all. She got a lot of the action that a part of me deep down wanted. Troy wasn’t the only hot guy at our school. It was like our town specialized in growing corn-fed Midwest farmboy hunks, or something. Heck, I was one, and surrounded by them.

She knew this, too. She knew within a minute of looking at me that I was gay, even though no one else ever said anything to my face. And she didn’t judge me—she thought it was cool, and she talked to me like no one else ever did. Like we were the founding members of the Big Cock Fan Club, though as far as I knew, she had no idea what I had and hadn’t done, which was mostly ‘hadn’t’ at that time. But she’d tell me shit, and mostly I just listened and grinned, and played along.

Troy and I had swigged beers and gotten drunk plenty of times as we were coming up; Marie was the first person who got me high. And I mean seriously, truly high. Weed at first, and the other things that I didn’t usually ask about. Troy knew about it, and I knew he didn’t approve. He’d tried a thing or two with us, but the crazy thing was, we’d get absolutely baked, and Troy just got clearer and glowed more. Marie was the only person who told me she saw Troy glowing, and for some reason, I just nodded but didn’t confirm I could see it, too.

Marie knew that Troy and I were inseparable, and she was OK with that, because she was maybe as in love with Troy as I was. He cared for her, sure. He loved her like she was his kid sister. But, man, she loved him something fierce, and she talked and wiggled and inveigled her way into our little circle of two until it had to stretch enough to become a circle of three.

She’d cheer us on from the sidelines of games, whooping and hollering like she was related to us. We’d go to parties together, picking her up in my truck, driving around with her crammed between us on the bench seat.

People started to talk, as they do. That we were both fucking her. That we were some kind of throuple. Marie and I would giggle about it, and Troy was Troy. Amused by it, but a bit above it all, tuning in to the frequencies that only he could hear.

The problem was that she really wanted it.

She confessed to me one night, drunk at a party after we’d lost the Big Game, while Troy was roaming around, making the rounds. She loved both of us. She was attracted to me, sure, and she loved me enough as a friend that she’d happily sleep with me, but she wanted Troy like she’d never wanted anyone else.

She told me she couldn’t understand it, because no guy had ever made her feel the way he made her feel—love, and loved, and like she was worthy of it. She wanted to have his babies, she told me, as many of them as he wanted, and some of mine, too, if that was what I wanted. They’d get married, and I’d live with them, she figured, and if she and I shared Troy in a house of love, it was all OK by her.

I told her that I didn’t know how that would work, and it was freaking me out. Fact is, I hadn’t ever been called out so directly about wanting my best friend, and the truth is that the idea of sharing him with anyone made my vision go red with fury—but I couldn’t let her see that in my eyes.

I understand all this time later that part of my rage was because she was talking about her and Troy getting married, and me sharing him on the side of her marriage to my best friend. It pushed me to the side, and it pissed me the fuck off. I felt like I’d be a third wheel in her vision of man-plus-woman-equals-babies. I didn’t say that, but I said some things close.

Marie was one of those girls who could go from drunk to obliterated in three extra sips. I think my answer wasn’t the ringing endorsement she’d wanted to hear, and so between the joint we’d shared and the drinks she’d had, she suddenly turned into a stumbling, weeping mess, begging me to take her home.

I found Troy and told him I’d take her home and come right back for him. He seemed to sober up instantly, and said he’d come with. I got angry at him, first because I felt like he was judging me for drinking and smoking, and second because I didn’t want his help on this.

What I wanted was to drive Marie home, and to have some time with her to make my point that Troy was off limits. Something about what she’d said and the way she’d said it had my dander up, and I didn’t care if I was acting like a jealous girlfriend—somehow I needed to find the words to make it clear that Troy was mine first.

Troy put his hands on my shoulders, and I relaxed immediately. I felt like I sobered up a bit for sure. He told me to be careful and wouldn’t let me go until I told him that I would.

I could draw this out, but I won’t.

I tried talking to Marie on the drive, half paying attention to those dark farmland roads, but she just wouldn’t listen. I guess her attachment to Troy rivaled mine, though it still felt like she was on my turf.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened. Just that she’d said something that triggered the red fury—my deep instinct to protect Troy, and also not to be shoved aside—and I was screaming something vile and demonic at her.

Some many tentacled monster of greed and envy and hate was climbing up out of me through my words, and the next thing I knew, I was sprawled across the front bench seat, my arm screaming in pain, shattered.

The rest was a blur for a bit; I don’t know how long it took to sit up and slide out the door of the truck. All the while, flashes came to me: the recollection of that ten-point buck shattering the windshield; poking at the white bones sticking out of my bloody, ruined right arm; finding the bodies of both the buck and Marie lifeless on the road in front of the truck.

The Universe collapsed in on itself, and in that moment, all I was made of was pain and grief and fear.

The cops showed up next, and for ten minutes I was a shivering wreck, trying to be coherent enough to explain what had happened.

I don’t know what they saw and heard from me, but it quickly became clear these were not the cops who were buddies with me and Troy; these were the versions of them who were eager to arrest a drunk who had just killed a girl, buck or no buck.

Out of nowhere, Troy was there. To this day I can’t figure out how he made it there first, before the truck of partygoers that pulled up several minutes after him.

He came right up to me and was talking to Bryan, the officer who was trying to cuff my bruised left arm and my shattered right arm together behind my back while I howled in pain. Troy was saying that he needed to take the cuffs off of me and let me go, and Bryan was saying there was no way, a girl was dead.

That’s when the others arrived, pulling up in someone’s huge F350. A girl from school, Mandy Miller I think, let out a scream. Troy used that moment to walk over to Marie’s body, and the next scene is etched in my brain for the rest of time.

In the dimming headlights of the truck, he crouched down next to Marie. He touched her hair like he was brushing it, but I could see he was moving away pieces of glass. Bloody glass. It was like he was talking to her, convincing her to get up and to stop pretending.

And then, a second later, she was. She was moving, sitting slowly up, brushing off her dress like she’d been caught napping on the worn country road asphalt. She shook her head a bit, and then she glanced up into the lights and locked eyes with me.

My blood froze. She had been dead. I had touched her. She’d had a huge chunk of windshield glass embedded in her forehead. What I was seeing couldn’t be true, but there she was.

Troy walked her over to us, his arm around her shoulders. She looked at him with a loving, grateful gaze. My insides tightened, and I felt an echo of the red fury that had gotten me into this mess.

He stood her next to Bryan and Davis, the other cop, and they proceeded to ask her questions. The folks from the party were still hanging back, a murmur going through them.

Troy came over to me and brushed the handcuffs off my wrists like they were dirt, and pocketed them.

“Are you OK?” he leaned in and asked.

“How the fuck did you do that, Troy?”

We locked eyes, and he shook his head. “Later, Deek.”

He ambled back over to the stag while the cops were fawning over Marie, and I just stood there and watched him. The same deal, crouched down next to the stag, and whispering like he was talking to it.

Everything else that had happened, and God help me, all I could think about was how great his ass looked in his jeans while he did that; how masculine and manly he was looking, like he’d gone and grown all the way up into a full-fledged adult.

He turned around and looked at me and smiled, like he could hear my thoughts, which he just might be able to.

He sauntered back over to the cops, steering Marie away from them and towards the group of folks in the other truck. She was protesting that we should take her home, but Troy was just reasonable explaining that we needed to fix the truck, and shouldn’t she get home so her folks didn’t worry?

She seemed less dazed and less drunk with each step. Soon enough, the truck was taking off with her in it, waving at us from the front cab like she was the Prom Queen on her way to Homecoming.

“We still gotta arrest Deek, though, Troy!” protested Davis. Bryan looked at his partner and nodded.

“He did blow a point-nine, Troy.”

Troy was shaking his head, the glimmer he had coming back like an aura of the smallest fireflies glowing around him.

“Naw, he’s fine guys. Go ahead and retest him. Plus, I’ll drive this thing home. He hurt his arm, so I gotta get him back to his Ma before she worries.”

Davis was shaking his head like he was trying to push a bad dream out of his mind, frowning. Bryan was taking a step towards me, as if he was going to cuff me again.

What happened next was in slow motion.

Bryan had hooked the breathalyzer onto his belt. Troy saw it and was going to reach for it to make me blow again, to prove his point.

Davis caught this motion out of the corner of his eye and thought Troy was going for Bryan’s gun, which was right next to the breathalyzer on his belt.

I saw Davis pull out his pistol, his arm on an upward arc. I saw what was about to happen and leapt into the space between Troy and Davis, and suddenly a white-hot fire was spearing into my chest.

I heard Troy shout

“NOOOO!”

And then a blinding light, and the sound of a thousand pianos crashing down a million staircases hit, and then

I was lying on my back, on the road. My head was cradled in Troy’s lap, and he was leaning over me, huge, hot tears splashing me on the face. He was laughing and crying. I’d never seen him like this, but rather than scaring me, it comforted me.

“What…happened..?” I managed to heave out.

“You. You fucking happened, you dumbass. You scared the shit out of me!”

“He was gonna shoot you, Troy.”

He nodded and sighed, “I know.”

“I couldn’t let him do it. I’m never gonna let anything bad happen to you, bud.”

He nodded a bit more, and another tear hit my face.

“That’s not your choice, Deek.”

“The fuck it isn’t, Troy!”

I sat up and a wave of dizziness overcame me. I looked around and noticed that everything was gone. Bryan, Davis, the cop cars. The stag.

My truck was still there, but the windshield was intact, except for a very large crack that meant I’d have to replace it. The truck did not look like it had hit a ten-point buck at any point in the last decade.

“What…the…?”

“Just sit still, bud. You’re dizzy, you had a big shock to the system.”

I nodded, looking at him in wonder.

“Just next time, don’t try to protect me like that, OK?”

My anger rose again, this time white hot.

“No! Fuck…Fuck you, Troy! NO!”

“Hey, calm down, man…”

“No, Goddamnit! No! I will not calm down! You’re my best friend, Troy. I can’t live without you! Don’t you fucking tell me to not protect you! I will always protect you! I’ll take a bullet, whatever I need to do….”

“No, Deek! No, you can’t say that! You have to let me…go.”

The newly unleashed anger inside me roared, and suddenly I was yelling at him.

“I will not let you go! I’ll never let you go, man! I don’t care if you’re in love with Marie or whatever, don’t fucking tell me I have to let you go and not protect you! How fucking dare you! I am in love with you, you stupid asshole!”

We looked at each other, eyes wide with revelations.

And suddenly I was weeping. I don’t mean crying. I mean, full-on sobs that I could not control were coming out of my body.

Troy grabbed me in a fierce hug, and I wept on him like a baby. Furious, and relieved, and scared, and—goddamnit—as hard as a motherfucking rock in that moment, as if my dick had a mind of its own.

Troy squeezed me, hugging me tighter, and a wave of dizziness passed through me. He put a hand on my head and said, “Whoa, there, buddy,” and lowered me to the ground.

I woke up in my bed, late in the afternoon, on what I thought was the next day—but it wasn’t Saturday afternoon, it was Sunday.

I’d slept for a day and a half. I asked my Ma how I’d gotten home, and she said Troy had driven my truck home, had explained to her that I’d had too much to drink at the party while helping her haul me upstairs, and then walked home himself.

She didn’t scold me about drinking; she just went on and on about what a great guy Troy was, and how lucky I was to have him as a friend.

I was halfway through a late lunch she’d put together when I remembered the full scene, including the fact that I had told him I loved him.

I suddenly had to see him as soon as possible.

So that’s how it happened. That’s how it came to be that after the incident with Marie that I learned the truth, and that I finally kissed him, and that I then lost him forever.

I’ll try to keep it together long enough to tell the whole thing, but I know it’s going to take its toll. Bear with me.

We hadn’t talked in nearly two days, which was not just weird for us—it was unheard of. I don’t think we’d gone that long without being in each other’s presence since we were nine or ten years old.

It was late afternoon, coming up on golden hour. I headed over to his place and saw that his Pa’s truck was gone. I walked directly through the house and out again, into the backyard. The tall grass blended right into the grassy hill of the back forty, and I could see him up there, sitting in that spot in a beam of sunlight, just like I’d found him years ago, and many times since.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, and then noticed that he was talking to someone. Another man, with longish wavy brown hair and swarthy skin.

I headed up to see them, and within a minute or so, Troy had seen me and waved. I waved back, and the stranger waved at me, too; I don’t know why, but that made me smile.

As I got partway up the hill, the stranger stood up, and he and Troy hugged before the stranger turned and headed my way. They didn’t look much alike, but something about the two men reminded me of each other. Some part of my brain wondered if I was about to hear about Troy’s brother from another mother.

The stranger and I neared each other, and he waved at me again. I couldn’t resist the urge to return it.

When we got close, he came right up to me and said, ‘Hey, Deek!’ like he knew me. As we grabbed hands, he pulled me into a bro hug; you know the one, hands clasped, right shoulders bumping, left hands patting on the back.

Except he held it for a moment, and he said softly, “I’m real glad you’re OK, Deek.” I pulled back to look in his eyes…and what I saw in that gentle amber-brown was an ocean of compassion.

“He’s worried about you,” the stranger said, and then he pulled me back into a hug. I felt something soft and warm and brittle snap inside my heart, and then I was sobbing onto him. And it was OK. I knew as sure as I have known anything before or since, that it was all OK, and that I was loved.

I pushed apart after who knows how long, my face covered with snot and tears, and I was suddenly incredibly shy around this man whose name I didn’t even know. I cast a wild-eyed glance up at him as he smiled gently at me, and then I squeezed his arm and let go. He mirrored the action, and we then patted each other’s shoulders as a way of taking leave from one another.

I stumbled up the meadow, wiping my face with my shirt as best I could. I looked up, and Troy was sitting there, gazing at me with a smile on his face that put the sun to shame.

I glanced back at the stranger, and he was impossibly gone. He couldn’t have crossed the space to the house that quickly, and yet—no stranger to be found.

I looked back at Troy, and he gave a small shrug and a bigger smile.

I was drawn to him now and sprinted the distance between us. He laughed, and when I got to him and stuck out my hand, rather than letting me pull him up, he pulled me down onto him.

We wrestled for a minute; rough-housed, really, and laughed and growled at each other like fools. But after a moment, both of us were struggling to contain our hard cocks, and so we stopped, and pretended not to notice the reason why.

I rested my head on his shoulder, and he tousled my hair, in a way that he sometimes did that made me feel special. I sighed and leaned against him for a moment.

“You’re gonna be OK, Deek.”

I sat up and looked at him, not sharply, but with a question.

“He said you were worried about me,” I answered.

“Yeah,” Troy nodded, and held my gaze with those insanely blue eyes.

“Who was that guy, anyway?”

Troy sighed and looked away for a minute, as if the dandelion fluffs nodding in the breeze next to us could provide him with some answer.

“He’s…kind of my brother, I guess you could say.”

He looked back over at me with a look that was more seeking reassurance than nervous, but which surprised me all the same.

I laughed and grabbed him by the neck, a kind of mini-hug.

“That’s cool! A brother? Damn, Troy…that’s so…cool!”

We both laughed at my lack of eloquence, and he kind of nodded shyly at me, blue eyes bright.

My head was swimming, and I don’t know why I said what I said next, even to this day.

“I guess that kind of makes him my brother-in-law, huh?”

We both froze, and my head whipped around to look at him, my brain spinning out in the mud at how to take back or change what I’d just said. My eyes were wide, and he looked deeper into my soul than I’d ever felt from anyone before or since.

We had never talked about this. Not once. In all those years we’d been…together, we’d never said anything close to this. Not until the night with Marie and the buck, and we hadn’t talked for two days since.

A silly grin cracked his face, and he smiled and nodded at me.

“Yeah, babe. Yep. That’s exactly who he is.”

His arm grabbed my neck, and he bumped our foreheads together.

“That was your brother-in-law, Deek. He’d be happy to hear you say that.”

He kissed me then.

A first kiss, hot and awkward. Just lips touching between our two foreheads pressed together, and when I tell you there were fireworks and stars and lightning and thunder, I only mean that those are the closest human words that can come to describing what happened in that moment.

We pulled apart, looked at each other, and then burst into laughter. It was like the whole meadow burst into laughter with us, the birds, and the insects, and the deer in their hollow off in the distance. All of nature laughed with us, and the sun glowed brighter as if just for us. We laughed until we couldn’t take it anymore, and then, finding hands, we slowly levered ourselves upright, pressed close.

“I tell you, when I first saw him, I thought he kinda looked like Jesus,” I said.

Troy tightened his grip around my hand and somehow pushed me away a bit while also pulling me closer to look at him.

“Deek,” he said.

I could see the answer written in his eyes. I knew it wasn’t a joke. I could see his eyes, and I could see in my head his mind tripping over the right way to tell me.

I sucked in a breath.

“I…what…I…that man. That was Jesus Christ?”

He nodded at me, smiling, but as sad as I have ever seen him. He rested his palm on the side of my face, just like he’d done to that stag all those ages ago, and I could see and hear and live him. His life. Things he’d done. Impossible things. Things that I hadn’t seen, and things that I had seen but still didn’t believe.

Tears spilled over his eyes, and somehow, he was more beautiful than ever. All I wanted to do was to hold him close and to tell him that whatever this darkness was, passing between us now, whatever it was, it was something we could overcome.

I grabbed onto his wrist, not to pull his hand away, but to press it closer.

“That was Jesus, and he’s your brother?”

Troy nodded, his face wretched for a moment.

“He’s Jesus. Yes. And he’s my brother, in a way. And in a way, he’s also me. I think.”

There was a heat flowing between us. I recognize it now, a bit, all these years later. It’s the heat of prayer, true prayer. It’s the heat of healing, of Spirit moving through human flesh, heating us up and making us glow like we’re the tungsten wire in a light bulb.

“You’re Jesus?” I whispered.

He nodded, his eyes spilling tears so hot and fast that a part of my mind wondered how there could be this much saltwater inside one human body.

“If I want to…” he said.

“If you want to?” I stuttered. “If you want to? What does that even mean?”

“I can say no. I can. It’s allowed. I’m allowed to say no. It’s free will. It’s always free will.”

I was still gripping his arm, his palm a branding iron on my cheek, so hot, and yet somehow not hot enough for what I needed. His other hand gripped my shoulder and kneaded my trap as if he were constantly testing to see if I was still real. To be sure I wasn’t running away from him.

I shook my head. “What? What do you mean?” I was shaking so hard that my voice was jumping; I could barely control it, fighting to get the words out. “Say no to what, Troy?”

I said it, but the words wouldn’t stop coming, even as I knew what he meant, and I knew what I was asking. “He couldn’t say no. He tried. He asked that the cup be passed from him, right?”

Troy was shaking his head. Short at first, and then furiously. It was the first moment I noticed he was shaking, too.

“No, no. No. That was what they wrote later. He knew he could. He knew, and he didn’t, and he did it anyway.”

We were locked there, in that embrace, in that meadow, the fire of Universe flowing through us both. Everything had gone quiet, and yet the world was still alive with the sound of us; the sound of our breathing and our hearts, and of every cell in our bodies chugging along as they always had. As if they would, forever.

Troy was shuddering, and the words jolted out of him like we were riding in my old truck down a bumpy road.

“He did it anyway. He could have said no, but he did it anyway, even though it didn’t matter.”

I shook my head at this. Some part of my brain knew what we were talking about, and moreover, knew that we were talking about Troy, and his impending death—which, when I think about it now, I’m not sure why that wasn’t my biggest focus in the moment.

Troy was weeping now, and he was begging me. Begging me to process some understanding he had, that I just couldn’t see.

“It mattered,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if I believed that, or if it was just a lifetime of church.

“It didn’t!” he roared at me, angry now. Furious, but not with me, I could tell.

He grabbed my head and pressed my forehead together with his as if he could force some kind of knowing into me, and…

And we fell. We fell into a world, and upon all that is holy, I tell you now that the world was real.

There was music and dancing, and I twirled about, and the man spinning me around was Troy, and not Troy, tall and dark, and handsome, and looking at him even now in this dance made me wet. Even though we had had four children together over our lifetime, and were surrounded by grandchildren, my God, this man I loved, as handsome as a claerk!

We were dancing to the traditional music of the springtime festival to Da-mon, the purple and green dragon God who made the world, who lived inside the heart of the sun. A silly old story, but who knew? It could be true, and what was the harm in old-school religion anyway when it got you moments like this with your family?

My hair was flying around my head, and my breasts were bouncing, but this, too was part of the dance. The cupped hands, turning in and out and in again, the long lean back with the shaking of the chest, and then leaning forward to gently bonk heads with your partner, and the laughter, which watered the ground for spring and made the flowers grow.

We were in the restaurant we owned, authentic Alexandrian food, as good as the old empire, they said. Even better than if you were in the food district of modern-day Solaris, back in The Enlightened Country, but here in the heart of the big city of Shka’gwa, the capital of Unified Provins of Amerigonia, the most powerful nation of all 47 on this continent.

The festival was good, and the food and the wine were flowing and the skra-smoke billowed in the room, and yes, I was happy, if you were asking, even though I knew the world wasn’t perfect. The government could be cruel, it was true, and the Temple of the Serpent in Pareet was led by senile old Franche men. There was another war in the South again, a remnant of the Fifth World War that had never truly ended, thirty years ago.

But life was good, here, me and Traei…

And then I was back, head pressed against Troy’s staring in his blue eyes, and I felt so very clear that what we had just seen was a world where Jesus had let the cup pass, and while all of history was different, nothing was particularly changed.

Humans were still humans. They lived, they laughed, they fought, they fucked. They made war, and they made babies, and sometimes they did the two things at the same time, locked in the eternal battle of hope and despair.

The shaking had calmed a bit, but I knew that we were both locked together in this moment of decision, and that somehow what happened here meant a very great deal to the future of a very large number of people.

“I. Can’t. Do it,” he breathed, as if he were letting out a lungful of skra-smoke.

I nodded slightly, still shivering, hot in the power of this moment, and warm in the heat of the golden-hour sun, but freezing inside at the magnitude of this hinge-point in history.

“But what if…what if you have to?” I asked, pleading, but not sure for what.

“I. Can’t!”

Our hands were wrapped around the backs of each other’s necks, our foreheads still pressed together; I felt as if I let go of him, we would fling apart, like astronauts stranded in orbit, spinning out of control. I could see the anger in his face, feel it vibrating within him, and not an ounce of it was directed at me, I knew.

“I can’t,” he breathed. “I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!”

“I Can’t! I CAN’T!!! I CAN’T DO IT DEEK! Because of you! All because of you! Because you fucking love me you stupid fool, and you are so fucking loyal to me you will never walk away! You’ll never turn away from me Deek, you’ll never say no, you would never abandon me, I’ve seen it a million times, and you never just go and save yourself. I saw it two nights ago! All the worlds, and you’ll never leave my side, and I can’t do it because whatever they do to me, they will do to you, and I CANNOT LET ANYONE HURT YOU BECAUSE I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU AND I ALWAYS HAVE BEEN!”

All of eternity passed in that moment, and we were both heaving for air like we had run a race, and then the air collapsed back in

And we were kissing. We were kissing and oh my God it wasn’t the lips on lips from earlier, it was two men absolutely convinced that the secret to their own salvation lay deep inside the heart of the other. The only way to save ourselves in that moment was to be as connected as we could possibly be.

We didn’t have sex. I don’t think we had sex. I’m pretty sure we didn’t. But we connected, body-on-body in that space in a way that to this day I cannot describe to another human who didn’t experience it.

After all time had passed, and no time had passed, we let go, and we fell back, finally breaking apart from each other for a moment, before reaching our hands back out to touch.

And I knew.

I knew he was right. In the divinity of that kiss, I had seen all the possible futures, as clearly as he saw them.

There was no future available to us in which he lived and was Sacrificed, in which I also did not die. A thousand different ways to die. A million different ways to suffer. I’d seen the worlds in which he was the Second Coming. The few in which the very nature of love was changed by the example that I had set as his exalted, ever-loyal, also Sacrificed lover.

I’d like to think that those were kinder, gentler worlds; and I knew, thanks to him, thanks to his honesty, that those worlds were as riven by human strife as any other. Whatever Apocalypses awaited in any of those as-yet unwritten futures were disasters wreaked only by the hands of men and women.

Oh, sure, there were scattered realities where I lived, but as a shattered wreck, mutilated, and broken. In many, I was the Devil, and in most, I was simply written out of the narrative completely; I never existed in history to those worlds, no Book of Deek for me.

I didn’t know what would happen next—I think he’d shielded that from me somehow. But I knew we were saying goodbye.

We held each other for another long moment in the reddening light of sunset. We kissed, a thousand small kisses to make up for the lifetime of them that we’d miss.

I knew I was doing the right thing; that he had made his choice, and that it was his alone to make. I knew it, and yet I don’t think I could fully understand what was happening. It was so quick, it felt like a dream.

We said our final goodbye, with our hands and lips, and minds. We experienced more in that moment than I think some people do in a lifetime. And yet, I already missed him. I already longed for him, even as he was in my arms.

“You’re going to be OK, Deek.”

I nodded, my forehead rubbing against his.

“Free will, Deek. Promise me you’ll be OK.”

“I will. I do. I’ll be OK, Troy,” I said, and then continued, “You too, OK? Promise me.”

He nodded and laughed a little.

“I’ll be just fine, my love. I know it for a fact.”

I laughed with him, my heart exploding at hearing him call me his love, even though I didn’t feel any laughter or joy in this moment.

“Goodbye, Troy. I love you.”

He grunted, and then he was sobbing, and one last time we tried to devour each other as if that alone could save us.

Finally, we broke apart. We looked at each other, and then looked away. There’s no rulebook or guidance on how to take your final leave from your divine boyfriend as he’s about to say no to God Almighty.

I waved a little wave, and he did too.

“OK,” I said.

“OK.”

I backed away from him, and he closed his eyes. The subtle glow that always seemed to surround him these days grew fractionally brighter.

Suddenly, I had to be away. I wasn’t sure I could watch. I didn’t know what exactly was going to happen, but I felt like it was better not seen by me. I grabbed his varsity jacket off the ground and took it with me. I didn’t ask; I knew it was mine to take.

I stumbled down the hill in a fog of tears, God’s fingers from the most magnificent sunset I’d ever seen were illuminating this now-sacred meadow.

The light behind me grew brighter, and like Lot’s wife, I had to turn around to watch. I couldn’t not see what was happening to Troy.

He was on fire. Not burning to death, mind you, but on fire with a radiance that surpasses any art I’ve ever seen. His smile was incandescent, and I knew that whatever he was feeling, it was far from any torment. It was worlds away from the suffering I’d seen him endure in the visions he’d shown me.

Far from the torments he was saving me from.

He opened his eyes, and we locked gazes over the vastness that now separated us. He lifted his hand to me: a final goodbye.

The light and fire intensified until I could barely stand to look at it. There was movement—a flutter of wings more massive than anything I’d ever seen, and then a final surge of brightness that forced me to shut my eyes, and an explosion of light. An implosion of sound, of absence, that knocked me to the ground.

The silhouette of his face was burned into the backs of my closed eyelids like the face of Jesus burned onto toast.

I sat slowly upright, rubbed my eyes, and shook my head to clear it.

I stood on wobbly legs and looked at the place where he had been. There was nothing there, absolutely nothing. No sign that he’d sat there most of the afternoon, no indentation in the grass.

Whatever silence existed was filled a moment later by the chitter and skirr of the evening, like the volume being slowly turned up on a speaker.

I looked at his jacket, still in my hands. I brought it up to my nose and inhaled the scent of him, the only remaining trace of him, it seemed.

I steadied myself and made my way through the house to head outside to my truck. It took me a minute to realize that the house was empty. Like empty, empty, as if no-one had lived there in years.

I unlocked the front door, let myself out, and looked at a place I had been a million times in my life, hanging out with Troy, it was clearly the same house, but also clearly not a place that Troy and his father had ever lived, nor a place that looked like the home I had spent nearly half of my childhood in.

I got in my truck. The windshield was undamaged. No sign of the incident from two nights ago remained.

I drove home, and then I re-entered a world in which Troy had simply never existed. No one at school had ever heard of Troy Wedinger. A family named Wedinger had never lived in this town.

I’d like to say that I grieved and then moved on. That would be lovely, right? Maybe that I settled down eventually and got over the fact that I’d had a best friend who became my boyfriend for five minutes, right before he told God, thank you, but no, I won’t be the Second Coming of Christ, sacrificed to a world unwilling to be saved.

Maybe it should be easier to think that he did it for me. Because he loved me so much that he made my suffering more important than the suffering of the rest of humanity.

I’d love to tell you that it made sense, and that I got over all of that just fine.

But I didn’t.

I barely made it out of high school. The day I graduated, I loaded up my truck and drove away from home, and came here. Well, Denver for a month, with a trucker I’d met, and then out here to LA, which had been as much of a plan as I’d had.

I’ve been here for ten years. Ten years, tomorrow.

I’ve bartended, and I’ve partied. I did go-go for a while, and then met a guy who got me into drugs. Or, I let myself get into drugs, I suppose. Like Troy would say, free will, Deek. You always have free will, even when you think you don’t.

I did some meth, at first, and then the other stuff. All the other stuff, I guess. I’ve lost myself in booze, and sex, and drugs, and rock and roll. If it could be tried, I’ve tried it. And somehow I survived it all, probably thanks to this jacket I’m wearing here tonight.

It turns out that when your first boyfriend was the latest incarnation of God, there’s a big void left inside that nothing in this world can ever fill. And God knows I’ve tried. I’ve crammed damn near everything I could think of into my body in various ways, and I’m all out of ideas.

I guess I’ve hit rock bottom.

I guess I’m finally ready to let go, and let God, you know? It took me a while, but I hope he remembers me. God knows I can’t stop remembering him.

Anyways. Thanks for letting me tell you my story. I know it’s hard to believe, but I swear every word of it is true.

So, I’m Deek. I’m an alcoholic and an addict, and I’m ready to change.

“Hi Deek!”

Look, I know we all love our pets and think they’re the greatest. But I’m afraid you must accept the simple truth here, which is that Josie is the very best cat ever and that is my final answer.

I mean, look at her.

Josie’s just got her arms crossed, posing all Princess & the Pea like on the pile of sofa blankets like hey, here I am.

Photograph me like one of your French girls, I’d like to think she’s saying…

You might want to disagree. Perhaps you think your cat is cuter, or sweeter, or better in some way. I assure you, that can’t be true.

Look, Josie doesn’t even want to fight you.

She’s too sweet and hungry and dumb to fight. And that’s exactly how all the best cats should be — painfully stupid, eternally sweet, and at least a bit chronically hungry.

Josie excels at all these things. She is never sated and will beg me approximately 6,251 times per day for MOAR CAT FOOD. And look at her face.

I give her more cat food. How can I refuse her face and her dainty, pathetic little mews?

Josie is what’s called a dilute tortie. It’s like she’s a tortoiseshell cat who faded out into this amazing greyish tan variegation; in certain lights she nearly looks lavender. She also has this unique “comedy/tragedy” marking that splits her cute face in two, darkness and light, only both in mid-tones.

Torties are know for their feisty, ornery dispositions. Not so with Josie. She’s as docile as they come. When she was a kitten and my daughters were wee, they’d dress Josie up in tutus. She’d just sit there, placid.

She’s the perfect family pet.

Look at that perfect little cat loaf.

This is all a cat should be. Utter perfection.

We adopted Josie from PAWS in 2011. I went there because they had a wee calico kitten available for adoption and I reeeeaaaaally wanted a calico. So I raced across town to meet her, got ushered into the kitten meet-and-greet room, and tried to gain the attention and affections of one tiny, adorable, deeply aloof calico kitten.

While I sat there, Josie sauntered over, crawled into my lap, spun in a circle or two till she found the perfect placement. She then plunked down, turned her head upwards to stare at me as if to say, “Relax, I got you. I’m yours now and you’re mine.”

And then she just purrrrrrred.

I mean… how could I refuse her overt moves? She was meant to be mine. So I dashed across town to grab my then three-year-old so she could meet her. Of course, she was smitten. We had to take her.

When I looked at her paper work, I could see she was from Joplin, Missouri — a long way from the Pacific Northwest, where we live. I asked PAWS about it and learned she was one of the last of the Joplin tornado displaced kitties they’d taken on.

I was awed to hear this. She’d traveled so far to find us, and known such upheaval in her young life. Part of me thinks that’s why she’s so loving and accommodating — because her life started with tragedy.

What’s a little game of dress-up compared to a devastating act of nature, right?

Josie also has a brother, Kispin.

Kispin is awkwardly bad at being a cat. He makes weird noises and chews on weird things and hides. He vomits, a lot, and when he does the noise he makes is gahhhhhhh. It’s awful.

He mostly hides, and he likes to wake me up too early by chewing on my shoes, loudly, which is annoying (but effective).

See? Cats aren’t supposed to be smart.

We love him, but he’s just an odd creature.

Still, look at them, getting their snuggle on…

Josie even forgave us for getting a puppy.

It wasn’t the kindest thing to do to an elder cat, but darn-it, there was a pandemic and so we got a dog. Her name is Kira and she loves Josie. She steals Josie’s hard-won food, and licks her ears, and is generally a floppy puppy menace.

And sweet Josie? She just… takes it.

In conclusion, Josie=best cat ever.

I have no further points to make. I will simply leave you with this photo of Josie posing as a Christmas gift from 2021.

Anyone else out there have a dilute tortie, or really, any other cat I need to know? Please share links to your kitty stories in the comments!

This story was inspired by our May 5 episode of “The Daily Whatever,” where we invited special guest to talk about—you guessed it—our cats. You can watch the episode here:

April 11, 1984, was my father’s 46th birthday.

My sister Christy* and I were home with our dad, as our mother had just started working a new job, the first she’d had outside the house since she’d married and had the two of us.

I was fourteen. Christy was eleven. We adored our father and wanted to do something special for his birthday. I don’t remember what we got him for presents, but I do remember—o, lord, how do I remember—I decided I would bake him a cake.

While Christy and I banged around in the kitchen, he read in our parent’s bedroom, listening to whatever the South Florida classical music public radio station was playing.

As someone who loves to bake, and considers himself pretty damn good at it now, it’s hard to re-embody a time when I didn’t know what the hell I was doing in the kitchen. On this night, however, I didn’t. I’d had a previous baking disaster, which was the moment I learned that baking “from scratch” didn’t mean you just dumped things into a bowl and expected it to transform into a gorgeous frosted cake.

On this night I was using a recipe. I don’t remember which recipe, or what kind of cake, or what flavor frosting for that matter. There’s so much I don’t remember.

I do remember the moment my sister and I called our father into the kitchen once the cake was finished. Our giddiness, thinking we were surprising him as if he hadn’t been listening to us for the last hour. The “4” and “6” numeral candles on the cake glowing brightly.

And the image I will never forget: my father approaching the table, his eyes shining, and a big grin on his swarthy face—burned into my memory, flashbulb bright and clear—with a smile that radiated the love and joy and humor that embodied his spirit.

It’s so clear in my mind, I’d swear there was a photo of it. I’ve searched for that picture for years, and I can’t find it (if it ever even existed).

But I wish I had it. I wish I could see that moment again, even if just in a photograph—because it was the last time I ever saw my dad smile like that.

The next morning at about 8 am, he died in the shower while we were at school, and I never saw him again.

Much of the next day—hell, the next months, and truthfully the entirety of 1984—remains a blur to me.

But that indelible moment, and that cake, have stuck with me for more than forty years.

The cake stopped being a cake. It became a symbol. Of love, yes—but also of failure. Of all the things I couldn’t possibly have known and all the ways I somehow felt I should have. That’s what grief does, especially to us as children. It teaches you to find fault in your most innocent moments.

It wasn’t a perfect cake, so did he detect an imperfect kind of love from me? Or worse—I fed him cake the night before he died. Could it somehow be my fault?

Looking back, I know that’s a ridiculous conclusion. I was fourteen. I wanted to make something nice for my dad’s birthday. But over the years, that cake became fused with his death in a way I couldn’t untangle. It became the last act before the unthinkable. A celebration immediately followed by absence. The candles burned, and then—nothing.

In the lifetime I’ve spent processing his death, I’ve gone through almost all 973 stages of grief. I’ve found and excavated so many more than Elisabeth Kubler-Ross ever identified. She missed all of the ones associated with cake.

But the anger is real. Anger is an entire category of stages of grief, with at least hundreds of forms: sharp anger; dark, smoldering anger; deep titanic anger, welling up from the depths. Anger for every shade and season.

It didn’t come right away. It built slowly, over time, collecting in small pockets. I didn’t have the words for it at first, but it was there.

Anger at how sudden it all was, at how completely the world could change in one morning.

Anger that I never got to say goodbye.

Anger that no-one prepared me for how long grief can last, or for how it mutates, and how it resurfaces at unexpected moments.

Anger at how people eventually stop asking, assuming you’ve moved on, when really the shape of your life has been permanently altered.

Anger at a discontinuity so deep I literally wasn’t the same person from before to after.

For much longer than I care to admit, when that fury burned brightest within me, I’d mutter angrily to the shade of my father—always with me, in all things—how I never would have baked him that damn cake if I’d known what was coming next.

It was a cruelty to a ghost, born of that desperate, hot anger, as if the cake itself was the pivot point upon which all of history hinged.

But here is an unavoidable truth—there’s a version of me that only exists because of that loss, someone forged in the absence. I can track the ripple effects across decades. It’s in the way I approach love, fear, and celebration, as well as the things I still don’t trust to last. I’ve built a life—carefully, thoughtfully—and there’s joy in it, accomplishment, even peace.

But I also carry a small, hard kernel of fury tucked inside, a reaction to something that never should have happened the way it did.

And with the grief, and the anger, and the long passing of time—then there’s everything he missed. Everything I wish I could’ve shared with him. He never saw the adult version of me. He never knew I was gay—at least, he never heard me say it, and god knows I have no idea if he ever suspected or wondered. Would it have changed the nature of his love? I’d like to think not, but I have no way of knowing for sure.

He never tasted anything I’ve baked since, like his own mother’s snowball cookies, a recipe I inherited from my grandmother. He never met the people I loved and never saw the full arc of who I became. He didn’t get to know what I care about, how I’ve changed, how I’ve stayed the same. I love classical music and opera because of him. I love astronomy and science. I love traveling and exploring new cultures. All of these are gifts from him that I never got to share, or experience with him—or thank him for.

Every beach I see reminds me of him, not just because he loved beaches, but because we sprinkled his remains into the Gulf Stream off the Florida coast. He’s everywhere now, at every beach I’ll ever go to for the rest of my life.

And here’s a ridiculous thing I just realized, all these years later: I don’t have any idea what kind of cake he actually liked.

I’ve outlived him by nearly a decade now. And still, I think about that cake. About how it held so much love. And how it became the last gesture I made before everything fell apart.

So when people talk about “letting go,” I never quite know what they mean. The grief has softened, yes. The anger isn’t as sharp. But letting go? I don’t think that’s the goal. It’s more about learning how to hold it differently. Not like a wound, but like a scar—something that doesn’t hurt the same way anymore, but still tells the truth about what happened.

That cake was the last gift I gave my father. It wasn’t perfect. But it was real.

And for better or worse, it’s what I had to give.

Forty-one years later, I still hold that moment with me. Not because I’m stuck. But because some things are meant to be carried. Maybe forever.

I just didn’t know it would be cake.

* names changed for privacy.

In between bouts of ripping my hair out over the current state of the nation and the world, I have a far more personal, selfish, and ridiculous reason for distress: our stupid timeline is outstripping the events of the science fiction novel I’ve been working on for the last 8 years.

My upcoming novel, Light Shines Through, is part of a trilogy I have been pouring my heart into for what feels like forever; an idea that came to me more than 8 years ago, that at the time seemed far-fetched.

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The novel is set in 2042, with point-of-view characters from several of the “new” nations of North America that arose after the Second Civil War and the ensuing Greater Depression that wrecked the global economy.

My book isn’t about the Second Civil War per se, but the devastation, bloodshed, and nightmare fuel of that war is pervasive in the background of my characters as they try to rebuild the world after nearly two decades of chaos, death, and poverty.

I got so deep into worldbuilding for this epic that I spent hours creating maps and flags to ground myself in the reality that these stories would live in, including my Nations of North America, 2042 map, above. It was important to me to think about the destruction, the mass migration, the greed and stupidity that would result from a phase as cliched as “Second Civil War”.

Here’s a snippet from one of the early chapters:

“Eighteen years later, there are still very few things people agree on regarding the Flash.

Everyone but the most extreme whackos agree that at 3:17am, on the morning of Friday, the 15th of November, 2024, ten days after the most widely disputed election in American history, a nuclear device detonated in Washington, DC, wiping out most of the United States government.

Virtually everyone agrees that it must have been in the range of 800 kilotons to one megaton.

After that, it all starts to become debateable.

Although hundreds of groups ultimately claimed responsibility for it, there is no official consensus on who actually did it. Debates range from the obvious, like ISIS, or al-Quaeda, or Russia, or China, into the more improbable, like Mossad, or Canada, or a failed US military coup. Then come the downright ridiculous: the Freemasons and the Rothschilds, or Black Lives Matter, or the Sons of the Confederacy, or the lizard people living amongst us.

A fringe popular idea that has gained ground on the fractured remnants of the internet over the years is that the bomb was the result of an alternate universe test scenario, carried out by the superusers who control virtual reality, just to see what would happen, the theory goes. Rejoice, simulated humans! Alternate timelines exist in which the United States is still whole, and happy, and free. Or as close to those things as it ever really was.

Everyone has a pet theory, and after almost twenty years it’s become a bit of a cultural rubric to ask at bars or parties. What sign are you? Do you believe in the afterlife? What’s your theory about the Flash? resolves into Wait, you’re a Pisces who believes in reincarnation and thinks it was aliens testing us to see if we were ready to join the Galactic Alliance? Goodbye forever!

Secret reports put together by every remaining world intelligence agency might have more definitive answers. The reports that got released to the public were anything but.

The human mind hates a mystery, and will happily create a story to fill in the blank spaces surrounding an event, especially one of this magnitude. Into the void created by the absence of concrete data, an infinite multitude of possibilities can bloom, lotuslike, endlessly repeating and still never the same. And all of these, whispered in secret to lovers, debated about over poor coffee substitutes, argued over in the food line, fought about on the battlefield, screamed about in lonely despair, the only thing that remains 100% true is that the Flash — the event itself, the refugee crisis, the market crashes and wars that resulted — the Flash changed the course of human history forever.

Yep. In my book, the igniting event is a catastrophically bad Presidential Election in 2024, disputed and then rendered meaningless by a rogue nuclear attack on D.C. as nearly all leaders are gathered in Washington for talks on how to resolve the crisis.

In the stupid timeline we’re living in now, we thankfully didn’t have the nuke attack I envisioned in my book. And, I’ll admit, I also didn’t anticipate Elon Musk. But the 2024 election was catastrophically bad, and the results we’re living through every day make me feel like I’m somehow predicting the future. Some small part of me feels vindicated, in a messed up way. I always knew it could get this bad, even if I didn’t want it to.

But I’m telling you, and pardon my Afrikaans here, it is fucking my shit up that current events are outpacing the book I’ve been writing for nearly a decade.

I know I’ll get complaints here, from any number of angles. No one could get away with sneaking a nuke into Washington! Yes, but this is called fiction, see. Why did you have to recreate the Confederacy?! Ask yourself this: if those states were suddenly independent of the rest of us, what do YOU think they’d call themselves? Cascadia could never take that much territory in real life! Again, I’m writing fiction, and in my story, they could and they did. Why are Texas and the Confederacy fighting over Cuba?? Just…just read the book when it comes out, man. I swear I’ve got reasons for everything on the map.

I would, however, like to note two things:

• I liberated Greenland (sorry, Kalaallit Nunaat) long before he tried to buy it.

• I renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Texas before Google sold us all out for a dollar.

I know that in the face of the constitutional crises we are currently facing, and this simmering Cold Civil War, my distress as a writer is somewhere far down the list in billionth place.

Nonetheless, I’m here. I’m writing. I am still working on my book, which is ultimately about hope, and how science can help rebuild a shattered world. I am still trying to find time to sit quietly and let the muse speak to me.

And I bet I’m not alone! Have you had visions of a terrifying future that are now coming to life? I want to hear from you.

Please like, share, and comment if you are an artist of any kind who is trying to stay creative and productive during this, the absolute dumbest and shittiest of all of the timelines available in the infinite multiverse.