I blog and unblog, blog and unblog, whenever anything hurts me. I don't know why I do that, write and unwrite. Because I want to understand and settle on a version before I commit to it, or something. And mostly, for a long time now, I just haven't written a word, here or anywhere. He was jealous of even my words, so I gave them up. I gave up speaking to all male friends, and gave up writing anything down, and pretty much anything that might be a different me that he could not see. I never understood his jealousy and thought it would fade, as he would come to know clearly that the last thing I ever do is fuck around or hide shit. I've always stuck too much and shown too much, not the other way around (duh). I do now understand the jealousy now though, I think, and it was never really about me. People able to betray other people expect that everyone is so able and will do so. Nothing can talk them out of that belief. To them, it is as real as air. As real as they are to themselves.

Maybe everything works like that...? Like, if a person is afraid you'll get clingy, does that mean they're liable to be clingy? Etcetc. Maybe. I really don't know.

Here's what I know: Aaron was good to me, made me feel loved, and he was present in small ways that I most wanted, like to bbq stuff and to watch television (Game of Thrones, episodes of things, to wait for each week, are the one I like best) and to laugh at the kid's jokes, which are raunchy and endless. Simple daily things are what I like best. He never raised his voice or a hand to me. He never was anything but playful with the kids, a good kind of paternal that was brotherly mostly, not overbearing, with the boys, who are such good boys, such good gentle decent men coming up...Aaron never did anything to harm or undermine any of that daily beauty possible here, and added to it by seeming to enjoy it so much also, enriching our sense of ourselves as a good thing/place to be in this wide world.

And then at some point, something happened, and I don't know what it is and I will never know except the most basic fact of it, like an accidental death: he fucked someone else and disappeared one day. And traced back to when/how that happened, it was that he got a new job, and the next day pretty much (literally) he started texting-nonstop/fucking someone else who worked there also, and lying when he was here about it, that he had to work longer hours for training, my gut telling me something was off, but ... what?? I can only report all that in retrospect. In the moment, a man looked through his girlfriend's phone, called, and Aaron walked out the door and disappeared before I could even get the story from his point of view. All I had was a man's mother, the grandmother to a woman's children, hysterical and wanting me to stop a family I'd never heard of from coming apart because of what Aaron and she were up to. And when I turned around, I found my own life had come apart. That fast. In minutes. We'd been talking about what to have for dinner. I wish with all my heart that I had kept writing and had written down what we did that day, the day it started, the day he might have said he was taking out the garbage and maybe I would have been surprised at his uncharacteristic helpfulness and noted it in a journal and it would have been then, the first texts, when he was outside (?) ...but like I said, I'd given up the recording of days to be in days instead, so I believed.

And there will be no better fuller version than that. The details of my family packing his things and his family getting them are incidental in terms of illumination; they included no conversation whatsoever. I can think of many versions of what caused what Aaron did, but I will never know really. He is simply gone now. That is all I will know with certainty. So I can stop blogging and unblogging now. At least that part of it. The dead don't talk. He taught me that. "Dead is dead, get over it because we need the bed" is what nurses say. Since then, well you can imagine, I've been doing whatever people do when something happens to them like a sudden death, a terrible accident, a loss of control in a moment of how things were and no pre-planning for how anything should be afterwards. Sometimes I am livid, others sad, sometimes numb, I DO A LOT when I can, clean shit, burn sage, go to the doctor, act responsibly. My friends, my KIDS, wow, they are fucking awesome, their there-ness, their solid simple there-ness. Stalwart is my new favorite word.

And for my own understanding, MY version, all I can say at this point is that in every story I tell myself, we are both imperfect people of course, and he is a sympathetic character who when faced with a temptation did the wrong thing about it. People do the wrong things all the time, lamentable but human. But then he did much worse than a bad thing: he acted without any integrity about that thereafter as well. Hit is one thing, hit and run is another. So in my mind, I sort now: people who have personal integrity and people who do not. There are no other categories of humans or relations to me right now than those two.