2019 was a tough year for me. My wife got cancer, my best mate killed himself, and my Dad got emphysema.
My wife is going to be okay now, she's in remission. But the treatment was brutal and the hormone therapy part of it drove her mad. When it was all over, when she was at the very end of her treatment and getting radiotherapy, she left me. No explanation. She just... left.
I can't imagine how a mortal threat and the horror and agony of chemo affects a person - I don't think anyone can unless they have suffered through it. The strain on her was unthinkable - the mortal terror of it, the sheer sight of death, her cold breath on my wife's neck.
I have chronic neurpathic pain and pretty extreme bipolar. Both of which get much worse under pressure.
So she stopped talking to me.
She talked to her other friends online while I slept.
So that my pain wouldn't get worse. So that the stress didn't cause me to go manic, or worse, crash. She didn't have an affair as far as i know. In some ways I wish she had... I could get my head around that.
It's been eight months.
I am still in love with her.
But I... I see myself, from outside. See me with eyes not my own, watch what I do and how I react to what happens, what has happened... the terror of it all - the loss of Magnus dying on a beach in Melbourne... Maybe if I had called him more - maybe if I were a stronger person, Kitty would have confided in me...
Maybe.
But I... I still know who I am.
I have hated myself and questioned my worth, found myself wanting in every way. That made the physical pain worse and I couldn't do my treatment because of the pandemic and I got more and more isolated in my little world of painting and writing, my works and words becoming darker and darker so black and no-one wants to see that pain sprayed across a canvas or the pages of a book.
No-one wants to spend their money or hang something on the wall that shrieks of pain in the night in the cold morning in the sweet sunshine of spring.
I can't help Magnus. He's gone.
I can't get Kitty back. I'm an adult - this happens in life, even to two people who are the closest of couples, the best of friends, the two giggling in the corner and holding hands everywhere. She has made her choice. It is hers to make. If she wants to come back to me, she knows my door is open and wafting the smell of paint and cigarettes.
But she's not going to.
I've heard it in her voice.
That flatness... that... nothingness.
In the last few weeks, though, I've been able to go swimming every day again and it is finally, finally starting to help my pain. Hours without any pain are like being on ecstasy or in high euphoric mania - it just feels impossibly good, like my whole body is made of light and wonder, strength and endless promises of possibility.
And I realised that despite these losses and the loneliness, the questioning and the self-loathing that anyone can find in themselves in the mirror if they look hard enough into their own eyes, I don't hate who I am.
I still love me.
I'm kind. I love life.
It's a very lonely and empty life, but it is still full of wonder and hope and possibility.
And I have a dog.
Which, really, makes all the difference in the end.
If he still loves me, I can't be all bad, can I?
So I couldn't save my best mate. I couldn't love my wife enough to make love stay.
But I am full to the fingertips with love. And I do love myself. I have been trying so hard to be kind to me.
I mean, you can only eat so much chocolate and ice cream until it starts to become a problem, but you can cuddle your dog all day.
And seeing him wagging his tail and jumping around when I come home, it fills me up and I am finding that the creature that I was is boiling away under the strength of my passion and the quiet fury of my drive to work and work and make beautiful things in the face of pain, in the arms of terror, at the very brush of death's cold fingers.
I will.
I am.