Transcribed from my notebook, written October 7, 2004

I'm sitting at a picnic bench at Conestoga Lake CA. I just finished painting in my sketchbook and taking a few pictures. It's a beautiful fall day. The ducks and geese are being noisy, and the only human sounds I hear are the occasional passing car on the dam to my right.

The depression sits on me like a lead cloak. I managed to shake it loose for a little bit this morning, driving here. Now it's back and oh so heavy once again. I know I need to cut myself some slack here. I guess I'm so used to handling my normal depressions that I don't know how to deal with this one.

I've never been here, this place before. I've lost friends, family to death. But never someone I loved like this.

I have a really hard time with knowing that I was the last person he loved like that, ever. He told me once that how he felt about me blew everyone before out of the water. I remember thinking but not saying that I so hoped that someone fully available to him would come along and blow me out of the water. She never came, and I'm that one, the person he loved like that when he died.

That's awe inspiring and terrifying. It hands me a geas. For me to crawl back into my safe, distant shell would be a betrayal of this man, a betrayal of the something special he saw in me. I know this, core deep. And I don't betray a geas like that. Not when it's sealed by death.

So where do I go from here? I'm just as scared, if not more so as I've always been. I'm just as shy, as quiet as ever. I'm still me. But the me I was before Matt came into my life had given up. I had reached safety and simply stopped.

...

A motorcycle just accelerated across the dam. I stopped to watch it. I understand why he wanted to go ride like that on Sunday. It looks perfect for the adrenaline junky he said he was. I just wish he had come home on Sunday and sent me an IM saying he had so much fun. But, I can't even really wish I had asked him to stay. Not when he loved it so much.

I think I'm going to go home now.