The partner had only just joined CA, the consulting firm I’d hitched my survival to more than once, the place that specialized in reminding me loyalty was a one-way street.

They were so eager to have him that Artie, my (a-hole) boss at the time, asked me to help cover him and make sure his first few weeks went smoothly. I arranged the giant welcome flowers when he accepted. He was the next Chief Medical Officer.

And then one rumor was enough to erase him.

I liked working with him. We clicked. We got things done. Then one day, he was just gone.

Not the kind of gone where you get cake and a card. The kind of gone that shows up as a whisper in the email system. A calendar invite from the Disciplinary Committee. An HR note scrubbed clean of warmth or detail.

Rumor was someone saw him out to dinner with a subordinate. Rumor was they kissed. He was married. That part was never in the official version, but it hovered in the margins of every conversation.

I remember saying to a friend, stunned, “Out of all the restaurants in the city, someone saw that? Were they stalking him? Who reports something like that?”

I felt bad for him. I really did.

Back then, I could not imagine turning someone in like that. I could not imagine betrayal being its own kind of sport.

Then I watched it happen to me.

After seven years of supporting Artie, covering for him, doing the work, getting the kind of reviews other people at the company would have gladly backed up, he stopped giving me feedback and started whispering things that were not true about my performance. He had me train a woman as my backup, watched her laugh at his jokes and wear the right heels, and then quietly slid my job across the room to her because he liked her.

Help keep the Nespresso hissing

It was not strategy.
It was not merit.
It was preference dressed up as inevitability.

And something in me changed.
Not all at once, and not into someone better.

If I had seen him leave dinner with her in those heels, I would have reported him in a heartbeat. It would have been petty, and it would have been perfect. He treated me like shit. I would have been happy to return the favor.

That is not my most evolved thought, but it is an honest one.

For a long time after that, I tried to live by the kind of wisdom people like to quote when the world disappoints them: let them.

Let them whisper.
Let them sanitize cruelty and call it process.
Let them show you who they are.

At first it felt clean, almost noble. A survival trick. Step back. Watch. Do nothing.

But eventually, “let them” started to feel like a lie I told myself so I could sleep.

Because watching them work their machinery made something ugly rise in me. Letting them dismantle someone else felt too much like rehearsing how they would one day dismantle me. The more I practiced staying quiet, the louder the ledger in my head became. Debts. Slights. Small humiliations. Tiny acts of disrespect that did not disappear just because I refused to name them.

So I learned two things at once. You can let people show you exactly what they are. And knowing exactly what they are does not always kill the part of you that wants them to pay.

I used to think looking away made me better. Now I think it mostly made me easier to erase

.

They were not.

I arrived with very sincere writer optimism and a name that, in hindsight, may not have helped. I think my handle was Ghosts, Dogs & Dead Mothers, which at least one person found off-putting. Fair enough, maybe. But I had just written an 80,000-word book centered around my dead mother, and not long after that my stepmother died too. At that point I had, in the most literal and least poetic sense possible, two dead mothers.

That sounds harsh written out. It also happens to be true.

So I started where most people start on Substack: posting into the void, following a few people, hoping for a little reciprocity, trying to figure out whether I was bad at this or just early. I wrote things I thought were funny. They were not especially well received. Then I wrote a piece called I Chose This Life, and for the first time something shifted. Someone read it. Someone liked it. Someone restacked it. It did not go viral, because almost nothing does, but it got seen. More importantly, it got read.

That was all I wanted.

Not fame. Not internet domination. Not some fantasy of becoming a literary brand. I wanted readers. I wanted to know the words landed somewhere other than inside my own head.

That was also when I met H.

He subscribed quickly, commented generously, and seemed to understand the strange mix of writing and platform mechanics better than most people do. He talked openly about the algorithm, about reach, about how writers could help each other find audiences instead of waiting around to be discovered by magic. He offered editing help. He read some of my work. He encouraged people. He connected writers. He made the place feel less random.

That matters more than people admit.

For all the jokes about Substack being a glorified email list, it can also feel like a little frontier town built by insomniacs, mourners, essayists, novelists, obsessives, and people who do not quite fit anywhere else. When it works, it really works. You find people whose work you admire. They find yours. You restack something because it moved you, or made you laugh, or said the thing you have been trying to say for years. You start recognizing names. Then voices. Then patterns. Then people.

I found writers there I genuinely loved. A few were new enough that I got to be the person saying, “You should read this.” I connected some of them to H because he was good at helping people get traction and because he had built real relationships. That is one of the nicest things about a good online community: it can make generosity feel useful.

Then the same system that creates that closeness can also distort it.

A lot of the writing I care about on Substack does not come from some clean, polished, content-brain place. It comes from grief, shame, memory, family damage, addiction, longing, secrets, all the things people are usually trying to manage in private. That is part of what makes the place feel alive when it is good.

H published one of those pieces. It came from a real wound, one of the hardest experiences of his life. I know what that kind of writing feels like. You do not do it for fun. You do not do it because you have identified some clever market opportunity in suffering. You do it because something in you needs to be said, or named, or dragged into the light. Maybe you want healing. Maybe you want witness. Maybe you want someone else to feel less alone. Usually it is some combination of all three.

And then, while H was suspended, people started talking.

Not carefully. Not kindly. Not even honestly, from what I could tell.

What began as speculation quickly took on that nasty online energy that always seems to appear the minute facts are missing and people are bored, hurt, or eager to be right. Suddenly there were insinuations that the piece had been shared for attention. That people had been pressured into participating in some kind of emotional spectacle. That the network around him was really a “cult,” as if writers restacking one another is proof of mass manipulation instead of a normal way small communities work.

I have actually been in a cult. This was not a cult.

This was a loose group of writers trying to help each other get read.

Was there sometimes pressure to engage, to restack, to support, to reciprocate? Maybe. But pressure is not coercion. No one was forced. No one was punished. Mostly it worked the way relationships usually work: the people who gave the most energy tended to get the most back. That is not sinister. That is just how groups work.

What made the whole thing worse was the cruelty.

There were comments on that personal piece that were so ugly, so disproportionate, and so weirdly gleeful that I found myself wondering how many people keep burner accounts solely to be inhumane with less consequence. It is one thing not to like someone’s style. It is one thing to be skeptical of online dynamics. It is another thing entirely to watch someone write from an obviously painful place and decide that this is your moment to mock them.

That part I will never understand.

And here is the thing I keep coming back to: I do not actually know why H was suspended. Most people talking about it do not know either. That did not stop them from speaking as if they did.

What I do know is this: Substack moderation is opaque, inconsistent, and often absurd. I know that because I have been suspended too, and not for anything remotely dramatic. I have been temporarily blocked from posting for sharing links to my own work in threads where people were literally asking to read other people’s writing. Asking. Inviting it. Still, after a few replies, I hit some invisible limit and got locked out for hours, then longer. I filed an appeal. I got the usual vague language. Maybe it is a bug. Maybe engineering will review it. Maybe someone will respond eventually. Maybe not.

So when people act like a suspension must mean someone did something monstrous, I am not convinced.

Sometimes it means a platform has bad systems.

Sometimes it means automation is stupid.

Sometimes it means the machinery underneath our little literary neighborhoods is not nearly as thoughtful as the people using it.

And maybe that is what unsettles me most. Not just that people can turn on each other so fast, but that a platform built on intimacy can so easily become a place of paranoia. We are encouraged to be personal, vulnerable, confessional, and deeply human. We are also sorted by algorithms, throttled by filters, and left to interpret silence from a support system that barely exists. In that environment, people start making up stories to fill in the gaps. About suspensions. About motives. About each other.

It is a terrible way to treat writers.

I still love parts of Substack. I have met smart, funny, generous people there. I have found real readers there. I have been surprised by kindness there. But this whole episode reminded me how quickly online community can become moral theater, where nobody knows the facts but everybody has a theory, and the most vulnerable work somehow gets recast as performance the minute other people feel uncomfortable with it.

Maybe that is the risk of writing honestly in public.

Not just that people will misunderstand you, but that they will decide misunderstanding you is more interesting than reading carefully.

I think one of the hardest things about going through a truly catastrophic stretch of life is finding out which people can handle the reality of it and which ones turn your absence into a statement about them.

Since August, my life has not exactly been light. I lost my job of fifteen years. Leia needed her leg amputated, and then we found out she had cancer. My mother got sick in Florida and was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. My sister and I went down there, and my mother died a week later. Then came the funeral in New Jersey, with the burial delayed until May because the ground in Maine freezes. I had just started a new job. My eighty-six-year-old father stayed in New Jersey through the holidays, then decided to go back to Florida and live alone, which has made me more involved in his life than I have ever been. I commute three days a week by ferry, which sounds charming until weather turns it into an obstacle course.

In other words, I was not exactly sitting around with abundant emotional bandwidth, forgetting my friends for sport.

During that same stretch, one of our friends, Kay, lost her boyfriend suddenly. He died while she was with him. It was brutal. She was devastated. We tried to be there for her as much as we could, but around the same time, my own life started collapsing in on itself.

Another friend, JJ, had met Kay through us and gotten very close to her. At one point they were close enough that JJ asked Kay to be a bridesmaid in her wedding. But JJ strongly disliked Kay’s boyfriend, and after he died, she did not strike me as particularly gentle or empathetic. One time she complained about Kay’s “drama” and mocked the fact that Kay had bought herself an engagement ring after he proposed before he died. Their relationship had been complicated and semi-secret because his divorce was not final, but none of that changed the fact that Kay had lost who seemed to be the love of her life. JJ’s response felt cold, judgmental, and shockingly lacking in empathy.

The more I think about it, the more I can see that this was not new. When JJ got married, there were endless wedding-related obligations that somehow felt non-negotiable. Everyone was expected to show up, no matter what else was going on. One of the most telling moments was when Kay had to pull herself together and host JJ’s bridal shower the same day she had put her dog down that morning, because we all knew JJ would not understand if anything interfered with her plans. That was the pattern. Her needs were treated like emergencies. Other people’s pain was expected to work around them.

There were other signs too. Once I had to cancel a weekend trip with JJ and two other friends because my parents were unexpectedly going to be in town. They were in their eighties, and I did not want to miss the chance to see them. The other two friends were understanding and sane. JJ was furious. She wanted me to tell my elderly parents I already had plans. She could not absorb the idea that something real had taken priority over her disappointment. I remember thinking, with no elegance whatsoever, what the hell is wrong with her. Still, because this is what women do, because this is what conflict-avoidant people do, because this is what I do, I made a separate trip with just her to smooth it over. It was fun, but the pressure felt ridiculous.

Then there was the book. Years ago, in one of those warm, optimistic conversations that feels meaningful while it is happening, we started a tiny book club. It was the four of us. We only read two books, but in the course of all that, I said I wanted to write one. Kara said she wanted to help me. JJ volunteered to be our editor. We were genuinely excited. Or at least I thought we were. But once I actually started writing, her enthusiasm evaporated. She was always busy. She had to finish her own book from her thesis. She never outright said no. She just kept dodging. I finished my book and asked again. Nothing. I sent it a couple of times, thinking maybe she had forgotten, like an idiot. She never really asked me about it. In hindsight, that stung more than I wanted to admit.

JJ had already been at the same company for several months before I left. Her role had nothing to do with mine, and I never blamed her for taking the job. After I was laid off, I did ask her a few times to look up who was reporting to whom, because I was trying to understand why I had been passed over for a role that really should have been mine. Apparently she later decided that meant I had only been using her. That came as news to me. There were other people I could have asked. I asked her because she was my friend. Or so I thought.

Meanwhile, Patrick and I were not exactly out there building a sparkling social calendar with everyone except JJ. We had barely seen anyone. We saw Kay a few times, mostly on the fly, because she was grieving and because those plans were spontaneous and small. Once we all went to a holiday concert with Kay and some mutual friends. JJ later said she felt left out, but she had also declined that concert when Patrick asked if she wanted to come. There was no coordinated exclusion. There was just life, grief, timing, and people doing the best they could.

Over Christmas, I texted JJ from Key West and she responded kindly. It did not seem like there was some major rupture brewing. Then Kay’s adoptive mother died. She came over to catch up, and she asked if we had spoken to JJ. We had not. I suddenly felt bad. So I texted JJ to say I was thinking of her, hoped she was well, and missed seeing her. No reply.

Eventually I sent a more direct message because I had the sense she thought I only reached out when I needed something, and I wanted to clear that up. I explained, briefly, that life had been incredibly heavy. Her first answer was polite but cold. Then came the real message. She told me she had felt for months that she was of no priority or importance to a group of friends she thought would be in her life forever. She said she did not feel cared about at all. She also said that when she had complained about how Kay treated her, she felt her hurt had been brushed aside because Kay was going through a lot. Then she added that Kay had always trash-talked us and never wanted to hang out with us anyway. She even took a nasty swipe at Kay’s grief, basically suggesting her behavior was excused only because her married boyfriend died.

That was the moment the whole thing changed for me. This was no longer just a hurt friend telling her truth. This was someone unloading a backlog of grievance and using private comments as ammunition.

What struck me most was not just that she felt hurt, but how absolute her conclusion was. In her mind, distance did not mean life had gotten complicated. It meant she had been demoted. Forgotten. Reclassified. Every lapse became proof. Every missed beat meant something. Once I understood that, a lot of older moments started rearranging themselves. The birthday drama. The trip I had to cancel because my parents were unexpectedly in town. The bridal shower Kay pushed through on the day she put her dog down because everyone knew JJ would not understand. It was never just sensitivity. It was a worldview in which other people’s lives were constantly being measured against her sense of priority.

I do not think she was faking that hurt. I think she believes every word of it. That may be the saddest part. In her version of friendship, people are either proving your importance or quietly betraying it. There is very little room for grief, chaos, caregiving, bad timing, or actual life. Recognizing that is different from agreeing with it. It does not make her pain unreal. It just means I finally understood that no amount of context was ever going to compete with the story she had already decided to tell herself.

What I am really mourning is not just this fight, but the realization behind it. I had mistaken history and repetition for depth. I thought history meant sturdiness. I thought affection bought more grace than this. But some relationships are only easy when all they require is upkeep. The minute real life shows up, everything shifts. Suddenly your absence means something. Suddenly your bandwidth is taken personally. Suddenly the friendship feels less like comfort and more like a role you are failing to perform.

Maybe that is the actual lesson. Not every friendship can hold the weight of an actual life. Some can only handle the version of you that is on time, responsive, and easy. The one who answers quickly. The one who shows up on cue. The one whose emergencies never interfere with anybody else’s expectations.

That is a lonely thing to find out.

But it is also clarifying. Because once you realize a friendship feels like work instead of comfort, and like something you have to manage instead of just live inside, you stop trying so hard to win it back. You stop mistaking emotional demand for depth. You stop arguing your case to people who have already written the verdict.

I think I know now what I did not want to know before: some people do not really want the truth of your life. They want a version of you that keeps proving they matter.

And I am too tired for that now.

If you’d like to contribute to my caffeine funding, you can buy me a Nespresso pod. It’s substantially cheaper than coffee at Starbucks.

Buy me a Nespresso pod

Some of you are new here (thank you!), so I wanted to share a few posts that give a sense of what I write about.

I wrote a novel, You Seriously Don’t Want to Know, and I’m currently seeking literary representation. I’ve shared the first chapter here, along with a few stand-alone chapters I posted to get feedback.

You Seriously Don’t Want to Know, Chapter One The opening chapter of my novel. https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/the-dog-the-street-and-the-sky?lli=1

I Chose This Life? A personal piece about trying to make sense of life, grief, and some of the terrible things that happen in it. https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/i-chose-this-life?lli=1

I Didn’t Want to Talk About It A piece about childhood grief, and about something I did as a kid that stayed with me. https://open.substack.com/pub/katekara/p/i-didnt-want-to-talk-about-it?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=179nz2

I also write observational pieces drawn from my life, memory, and the strange connections my mind makes.

Take a Bow About feeling foolish for believing people who were clearly performing all along. https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/take-a-bow?lli=1

The Sympathy Card A letter to a friend of fifteen years who lied to me, watched me lose my job, and then sent a sympathy card when my stepmother died. I threw it out. https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/the-sympathy-card?lli=1

Ode to Chuck A letter to the boss I worked for for seven years, who had me train his girlfriend as my backup, then gave her my job and let me get laid off without hesitation. https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/ode-to-chuck?lli=1

The Cleaning Lady A piece about first-world problems, misplaced emotion, and the strange way grief can attach itself to people without warning. https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/the-cleaning-lady?lli=1

Was It Really About the Wasabi Peas? A piece about being a total Karen at the office, first-world problems, and the absurdity of a corporate machine that can handle transactions in milliseconds but can’t keep almond milk stocked.

https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/was-it-really-about-the-wasabi-peas

If any of these sound like your kind of thing, I’m really glad you found me.

Buy me a Nespresso pod

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Buy me a Nespresso pod

When Sarah Stern disappeared, I became obsessed with what had happened to her. It was close to home. The places they were talking about weren’t abstract to me. I walked them. I knew them.

Let me start from the beginning.

I walk three to four miles a day. We live in a shore town, so I’m usually on the boards, but sometimes I take side streets for variety or to find a little shade. One Saturday morning, I was out walking and there were helicopters all over the Shark River. The Shark River separates Avon from Belmar, and there’s a bridge I walk over all the time.

I remember coming home and asking Patrick, “Any idea why the Coast Guard is all over the inlet?”

We didn’t find out right away. But the next day or two, there were search boats in the river under the bridge. Divers in the water. That’s when I heard a car had been left on the Route 35 bridge and they thought it was a suicide.

Being a way too empathetic person, I felt it immediately.

Later I learned the girl was nineteen. Her name was Sarah Stern. She lived in Belmar. My nephew John was nineteen too. He was at Monmouth University, about twenty minutes from me. I could not make sense of it.

Then I saw videos of her online. She was funny. Happy. She looked like someone with her whole life ahead of her. It made it worse. It made it impossible for me to accept that she would just decide, in one moment, to jump.

The story kept growing. The car on the bridge. The idea that she might have gone to Canada. The money she had come into. None of it added up.

At some point, it stopped being about her.

It became about the bridge.

John used to come over a lot. He would get out of his dorm, away from his roommates and swim practice, and just hang out with us. We would order food, he would play with Zee, and tell us what was going on in his world.

After everything happened, I had this very serious conversation with him. It probably sounded like my Uncle Paul when I was young. Too intense. Too direct.

I asked him if he could ever imagine a moment where he would want to jump off that bridge.

He said things were hard sometimes, but no.

And I told him, completely seriously, if you ever feel like that, call me. I don’t care what time it is. I will come get you. I won’t tell your mom. I won’t tell Patrick if you don’t want me to. I will hide you. We will figure it out.

Yes, I am a little dramatic.

But I meant every word.

A few months later, he texted me and said he was thinking about the bridge.

I didn’t hesitate. What do you need. Do I need to come get you.

He walked it back a little and said maybe he was overreacting. He just needed to get out for a while. So I picked him up, took him to dinner, and we talked, but not in a way that pushed him. I didn’t need details. I just needed him to know I was there.

He told me he was tired. He missed his family. He didn’t like his roommates. Swim practice and classes felt like too much. He didn’t even know if he wanted to be there anymore.

I told him no one was going to force him to keep doing something that made him miserable. He was nineteen. He could choose something else. Just because something looks like the right path does not mean it is.

He left after his first year.

Now he works for his town. He is a volunteer firefighter. He married another volunteer firefighter. He is happy.

And one day, after a particularly bad day at my old job, I told him I was thinking about the bridge.

He didn’t hesitate.

What can I do. I will hide you. I will come pick you up right now.

I told him I would be fine.

But he meant every word.

Buy me a Nespresso

I couldn’t explain it. I still can’t. At some point, I realized I wasn’t talking myself down. It didn’t feel like my voice. It felt separate. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just there, like something stepped in when I couldn’t hold it together on my own.

When I started actually writing things down, it became harder to ignore. Every memory I avoided, something was already there. Not fixing it. Not changing what happened. Just softening it enough that I could stay in it.

When I felt alone or betrayed, when it felt like everything was working against me, there was something that kept me moving. Not a pep talk. Not pressure. It felt closer to love. Quieter. Steadier. Like a hand on my back.

I don’t know what it was. I still don’t. I just know I didn’t stop.

I didn’t mean to write Kevin. He wasn’t part of the plan. The plan was to write what happened and keep it grounded. Kevin doesn’t follow that plan. He shows up anyway.

And at some point, I stopped trying to make him.

I still don’t know if I created him or if he found me.

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In the winter we barely saw them, but Ahole never fully disappeared. He’d text, casually, about how we should really come into his office in the city, how lapses in treatment were “problematic,” how insurance companies needed continuity and justification. Suddenly there was talk of X-rays we didn’t need, urgency that didn’t exist, all so he could keep billing through the winter and maintain the fiction that the house next door was a place of business. It was never framed that way, of course. It was framed as concern… professionalism… doing us a favor.

He volunteered his services at beach volleyball tournaments too — hands everywhere, goodwill on tap — funneling people back to his house for adjustments. They didn’t have insurance, so I assume their co-pays looked a lot like ours eventually did: a handle of Tito’s, a case of beer. Ours, for the record, were officially fifteen dollars. Unofficially they ran closer to thirty, plus garbage cans, mail pickup, house watching, snow shoveling, sidewalk clearing, and — in the early days — even lawn mowing before we finally hired a service. The favors didn’t replace the co-pays. They stacked on top of them.

Big J was a study in contrast. She slept late — ten, eleven — while Ahole was up at the ass crack of dawn, claiming he couldn’t do anything until she was awake. She handled the weeding and gardening, a devoted tree hugger in both ideology and practice. Getting out the door took over an hour, every time: hair, makeup, the whole ceremony. Nature mattered deeply to her, as long as it stayed curated

.

Their side yard had an old fountain that never worked. Ahole talked about fixing it the way some people talk about quitting drinking or learning Italian — always one day.

Ahole’s superiority complex didn’t stop at chiropractic care. It bled into everything physical, everything communal — especially volleyball and mountain biking, the arenas where he liked to position himself as benevolent gatekeeper. He talked constantly about “levels,” about who was serious and who was just messing around, about form and fundamentals and how most people never really learned them properly. When Gino, John, and Patrick played what he called “crappy volleyball,” he’d say he might include them sometime — include being the operative word — as if participation were something he could grant or withhold. It was always framed as generosity. It always landed like judgment.

Mountain biking was the same. He spoke about trails the way some people talk about private clubs, dropping names and difficulty ratings, casually reminding everyone how long he’d been doing it, how much better his gear was, how most people didn’t really understand the sport. He never said outright that he was better than everyone else. He didn’t have to. It was embedded in the way he explained things no one asked him to explain, corrected people mid-sentence, and offered advice that felt less like help and more like a reminder of hierarchy.

Mountain biking finally cracked the façade. One time John actually went with him — a real outing, not one of Ahole’s theoretical superiority lectures — and Ahole fell. Twice. Couldn’t keep up. The terrain didn’t care about his gear, his experience, or the way he liked to narrate himself as an authority. John came back amused more than anything, quietly processing the mismatch between the man who talked endlessly about skill and the man who couldn’t stay upright. Later, deadpan, John said maybe they should do some crappy mountain biking next time so Ahole wouldn’t fall. It wasn’t mean. It was observational. And it landed because it reversed the hierarchy Ahole worked so hard to maintain.

What made it worse was that this condescension was inconsistent — selective. He could be charming, expansive, even fun, right up until the moment someone failed to meet whatever internal standard he’d decided to apply that day. Then the warmth disappeared. The tone shifted. You were either being managed, corrected, or quietly excluded. It took a while to realize that the friendliness wasn’t a baseline — it was conditional.

That’s the thing about people like that: they don’t dominate through overt cruelty. They do it through access. Through approval. Through the constant suggestion that proximity to them is a favor.

The breaking point came over a tree. A weed tree, really — something that sprouted from an acorn or a seed and never belonged where it landed. It sat on our side of the property line, unhealthy, buggy, dropping leaves into our yard and shading our driveway in ways we didn’t want. One winter, Patrick’s brother was visiting and offered to take it down. We probably should have asked first. Instead, we texted to let them know. They sent laughing emojis. I think they thought we were joking.

We weren’t.

The next time they came down, it all exploded. Ahole yelled at Patrick, furious, insisting he had no right. Big J — normally slow-moving, measured — looked like she was about to burst an artery. Kara and John were there, witnesses to the whole thing, and John, bless him, said, “Your house looks so much better without that ugly tree.” Big J snapped back, full volume: “SHUT UP, JOHN.”

That was the beginning of the end.

Eventually we slid into avoidance. Not dramatic, just polite hellos if we happened to be outside at the same time. Then even that felt like work. We changed the Wi-Fi password too — no announcement, no confrontation — just quietly cut off the freeloading. It felt symbolic. Small. Necessary.

Once, after a particularly significant snowfall, we didn’t shovel his sidewalk. Patrick had hurt his back — the irony was not lost on anyone — and his chiropractor neighbor was, unsurprisingly, unavailable. When Patrick ran into him later, Ahole said, completely straight-faced, “What, did I forget a copay or something?” He wasn’t joking. He eventually asked the other neighbors — both in their seventies — if they would shovel for him so he wouldn’t get a ticket. Watching that happen was the moment any lingering obligation evaporated.

After that, we stopped pretending. No hellos. No eye contact. Just parallel lives on the same block. Patrick, however, still wouldn’t let me park in front of their house, which somehow made the whole thing worse. We were estranged, not at war — but he still obeyed the imaginary rules.

While we were away once, Ahole told our dog walker that our dog barked a lot. She looked at him and said, deadpan, “Yes. Dogs bark.” End of conversation. I loved her for that.

We saw them coming and going but never spoke. And then one day, without consciously deciding to notice, we realized we hadn’t seen Big J in a long time. Sometimes Ahole had her car. But she was gone. Weeks passed. Then months. Then maybe a year. Instead, a different woman started showing up — different car, staying over.

Big J, who used to talk endlessly about how swans mate for life, had vanished.

We started joking, because what else do you do, that he’d killed her and buried her in the backyard of his other house. It was just one of those ridiculous theories my brain creates when something feels off and no one can provide real information. But the absence lingered. No Big J. No gardening rituals. No hour-long hair-and-makeup exits. Just an empty space where a person used to be, and a man next door who behaved as if nothing at all had changed.

Eventually I asked the seventy-year-old neighbors where Big J was. This was after weeks of Googling her name and scrolling obituaries late at night, half expecting to find proof and half hoping not to.

They told me she had died. An apparent heart attack.

That was the phrase. Apparent.

There was no obituary. No notice. No public marker that she had existed at all. Which felt on brand. Ahole, being Ahole, hadn’t paid for one.

There was no service that we knew of. No flowers. No cars lining the street. Just absence, confirmed.

A woman who once took an hour to get ready to leave the house vanished without leaving so much as a paragraph behind.

I didn’t know what to feel — relief, guilt, discomfort, some mix of all three. The jokes we’d made stopped being funny retroactively. Whatever else she had been — rigid, sanctimonious, exhausting — she was still a person. And now she was gone.

What stayed with me wasn’t grief exactly. It was the strangeness of how easily someone can disappear when the person left behind controls the narrative — or chooses not to tell one at all.

What unsettled me most wasn’t just how completely Big J vanished. It was how quickly she was replaced.

Not emotionally — practically.

Another woman appeared, then stayed. She drove a different car. She occupied the same spaces. Eventually she was in the garden pushing Big J’s wheelbarrow, possibly wearing her work gloves. I even saw him teaching the new woman to ride a bike once. She looked terrified.

Big J had always handled the weeding and planting, her quiet domain, the thing she cared about most. And now he was out there instructing someone new, as if the role itself mattered more than the person who had once filled it.

The continuity was seamless. Too seamless.

It wasn’t grief I saw.

It was logistics.

I didn’t think he was mourning. I thought he was managing.

And sometime around that same period, the old fountain in their side yard disappeared.

He dismantled it quietly — no announcement, no ceremony — and either got rid of it or moved it to his other house. I didn’t see where it went. I only noticed that it was gone. The side yard looked cleaner. Emptier.

Only later did it occur to me that things that no longer served him had a way of quietly vanishing..

I have a cleaning lady, and by most reasonable standards this should be the end of the story. She is kind, hardworking, and raising her daughter alone because ICE deported her husband. Every two weeks she shows up with a helper or two and, in about an hour, my house goes from looking like it was recently inhabited by wolves to something resembling civilization again. She doesn’t complain about the German Shepherd hair, which is impressive considering I own two German Shepherds and I’m fairly certain they shed their body weight every three days. She uses bleach, everything smells clean, and the house looks great when she leaves. She charges $100 to clean roughly 2,500 square feet of house, which, if you know anything about cleaning services, is basically robbery in reverse.

I realize this is a first-world problem and am actually disgusted with myself for this emotional turmoil. Why can’t I just be grateful and shut the fuck up?

So you would think this is where the story ends. A hardworking person does a great job at a bargain price, tolerates piles of dog hair and barking, and everyone should go about their day happy. Unfortunately, I come with baggage.

Part of the baggage is practical, and part of it is emotional. The practical part is that every single time she comes it is wildly inconvenient, and I hear myself saying that and immediately feel like someone who should probably cut her hair into a helmet and start yelling at teenagers in Target. The problem is that she comes while I’m working from home. Before she arrives, I have to declutter the house so that she can actually clean it. That alone takes several hours because my house seems to function as a staging area for dog toys, baskets of laundry in various philosophical states of existence, mail piles, kitchen clutter, and clothing that has entered the mysterious “in-between” realm where it is not quite dirty but clearly cannot go back in the drawer either.

Once she arrives, I have to move my laptop into the bedroom so she can clean the office. This means abandoning the giant monitors I can actually see and trying to do my job on a laptop screen the size of a Pop-Tart. The dogs, who normally follow me around like furry security guards, have to be locked in the bedroom so they don’t bark nonstop at her helpers, who are afraid of them. The whole thing only lasts about an hour, but during that hour the universe reliably schedules chaos. Someone on Teams suddenly needs something immediately. A meeting I forgot about pops onto the calendar. UPS arrives and needs a signature. A Walmart delivery appears. The dogs urgently need to go outside, the kitchen floor is wet, and I suddenly need to use the bathroom like I just drank unfiltered water in Mexico. Right now, to make matters more ridiculous, our porch is being renovated, so I have to sneak in and out through my tenant’s entrance like I’m escaping a crime scene.

Buy me a Nespresso pod

All of this sounds ridiculous even as I say it out loud, which is why I keep telling myself to get over it. But the truth is that the logistical chaos isn’t actually the main problem. The real problem is the emotional baggage she unintentionally carries with her every time she walks through the door.

She was recommended to me by Trish. If you have read my post “The Sympathy Card,” you already know who Trish is. If you haven’t, the short version is that she worked with me for fifteen years and apparently decided that warning me I was about to be erased from my job would have required too much emotional effort. So every time the cleaning lady shows up, there is a small voice in the back of my head reminding me of that connection.

Then there is Zee.

Zee was my soul dog. She was the sweetest German Shepherd you could ever meet—one hundred and five pounds of loyalty and quiet dignity, with a bark that could make strangers reconsider their life choices. Her helpers were afraid of her, which meant when they arrived I would lock Zee in the bedroom. One day when they showed up, I was helping Zee climb onto the bed. Her front legs suddenly gave out. She yelped, cried, and everything went sideways from there. I sent the cleaners home, called my husband, rushed her to the vet, and she never really recovered.

Now let me be clear: I DO know this was not the cleaning lady’s fault. I know that Zee’s health had already been declining and that the timing was simply terrible. Rationally, I understand that the two things are not connected. Emotionally, however, my brain still sees her walk through the door every two weeks and thinks something much less reasonable.

You killed Zee.

Of course she didn’t. She is a hardworking woman trying to support her daughter while tolerating an amount of German Shepherd hair that could probably be spun into winter coats. She likely has no idea she’s starring in a psychological drama inside my head involving workplace betrayal, grief, and a dog who deserved to live forever.

To make matters more complicated, I recently realized that she had mentioned to Trish that my mother died. That explains the sympathy card that appeared unexpectedly in the mail. For a moment I thought my one remaining friend from that company must have told her, and I almost didn’t believe her when she said she hadn’t. Eventually it dawned on me that the information probably came from a Portuguese-to-English Google Translate conversation with the cleaning lady. It was probably innocent conversation, not malicious at all. But it meant that once again Trish somehow had access to my life.

And now I find myself in the ridiculous position of wanting to fire a perfectly nice cleaning lady who works hard, charges very little, and does an excellent job cleaning my house. My husband refuses to even consider it. From his perspective this woman is a miracle. She arrives, cleans the house, and he comes home to a gleaming, dog-hair-free environment. He does not experience the laptop exile, the Teams chaos, the locked dogs, or the emotional flashbacks. He simply sees a clean house.

Which means that somehow my cleaning lady has become a minor sore spot in my marriage. The worst part is that deep down I know I’m being a little bit of a bitch about it. Not entirely—but a little.

Because the truth is that she didn’t betray me, she didn’t fire me, and she didn’t hurt Zee. She is simply the unlucky person who happens to be standing there when several painful memories collide. Every two weeks she shows up with her mop and her bleach, and I try very hard not to blame her for everything else in my life that still hurts.

There’s an old Madonna song I heard about a month ago that I can’t stop thinking about. Most of her music never really hit me in the soul, but this one did. Not even when it first came out — I probably liked it, but I didn’t really listen. I didn’t understand it.

It’s “Take a Bow.” It references Shakespeare: All the world’s a stage.

Something about that won’t leave me. The performance of people. The masquerade. Lines delivered on cue. Applause where there shouldn’t be any.

The love wasn’t mutual. The loyalty wasn’t matched.

How many people in my life were performing? More than I’d care to admit.

Part of me thinks I’m a fool for believing people. Part of me is just disgusted that anyone could be that cruel. Not just to me — to anyone. If someone did this to Patrick, or Kara, or my dad, even Wanda, I’d lose it. I’d go to war.

But when it’s me, I stand there like I’m watching it happen to someone else. Like I can’t quite believe it’s real.

“How was I to know which way the story goes?”

Apparently I should have known. Before they fucked me over royally.

I was there eight years before my boss even started. I knew the company. I knew the culture. I knew the landmines. When he came in, I helped him get acclimated. I watched his six.

And the other one — the one whose husband died — I knew her from the beginning. She supported me. She recommended me for the role to help him. I was there for her when her husband was dying. I was there after he died.

I gave everything. I’ll keep your secrets. I’ll save your ass. I’ll protect you when you’re not in the room.

And what do I get?

Judas friends. Volunteering me for the cross for the cost of a job.

And I asked. Repeatedly.

This wasn’t one person. It was four deep.

Was the whole seven years a performance? Pretending you liked me. Pretending I did a good job. And the other fifteen — was that just convenience? You aligned with me until it no longer served you.

And the one I trained — I taught her everything she knows about that job. She struggled. Needed constant help. I stuck with her anyway. Then she takes my job. No apology. No regret. Not even a goodbye.

The show is over. Say goodbye.

All the world is a stage. Everyone has their part.

How was I supposed to know where the story was going?

Patrick says I’m not supposed to say that out loud, but it’s not like I go around kicking strollers. I just... don’t like them. Especially little girls. High-pitched voices, nonstop questions, constant stickiness — it’s like being trapped in a nightmare with glitter glue and juice boxes.

Babies? Even worse. Everyone lies and says babies are cute, but most of them look like angry root vegetables. I’ve seen my baby pictures. I was not cute. I looked like a disappointed potato in a frilly dress.

We talked about having one once — me and Patrick. Briefly. I think I panicked.

I imagined doing 100% of the work while Patrick went fishing. Patrick has the weakest stomach of anyone I ever met. If he had to change a diaper, I’d end up cleaning up his vomit. You can’t wake him up when he’s sleeping — he physically CANNOT function. Even if he was willing to contribute, it would end up being more work for me.

And if the baby turned out to be a girl instead of Patrick Jr.? Forget it. I could see it already — the tantrums, the barrettes, the inevitable pink glitter explosion. I’d be stuck for 18 years with someone who hated me for not letting her get bangs.

If I could have given birth to a puppy, I would’ve.

German Shepherd. Female. Already housebroken.

But then there was John.

He wasn’t mine, but he might as well have been.

John was different. John was effing adorable. White-blond hair, giant blue eyes, porcelain skin, and a sense of humor that cracked me up even at four years old. He was sweet, curious, a little weird — my kind of kid. Not loud, not sticky. Funny in a dry way. Like he’d been here before and didn’t love it the first time.

Once, Kara and Gino went to a Yankees game and left him with us for the night. Patrick told John he was “going down” for a nap and John thought it was the funniest thing in the world. The more Patrick said it, the harder he laughed — until we were all wheezing and crying, and the nap never happened.

On Thanksgiving, I used to put him in the turkey roasting pan and pull him around the kitchen like he was on a Macy’s float.

He called me “Ba.”

Still does.

He is, to this day, the only child I’ve ever wanted to be around on purpose. I love him with my whole twisted, dog-loving heart.

He is the sole exception to the “I hate children” rule, which I still stand by.

If someone hands me a baby, I panic.

But if John calls me, I drop everything.

So no, I didn’t have a kid. And no, I don’t regret it.

But if I could’ve had John?

I might’ve actually signed up.

Zee was the bigger dog. It was in her nature. That was why I loved her so much, and why it broke me so much to lose her.

So let’s talk about the smaller dog.

Literally and figuratively, Diana is the smaller dog. Seventy pounds is not a small dog, really, but every other German Shepherd we owned has been larger.

And Diana cannot walk away. From a disagreement, from a fight, from a threat, from another dog, for her own fucking good. She will not do it. Ariel bites her face at least a few times a week. Do you think she runs and hides? Of course not. She charges at her, trying to knock her down off her three legs, which of course makes Ariel go after her even more.

Diana is piss and fire and will die trying. And as much as I loved Zee for not being that way, I love Diana for exactly that reason. Nothing will get her down. You will never take the fight out of her. Until you knock her unconscious, she will use every iota of her energy to get what she wants—or doesn’t want.

Diana usually succeeds, too, with cuts on her face, scabs on her ears, sometimes a random wound we find on her neck later, but she doesn’t fuss about it. She is doing what she wants, no matter what anyone says.

I’m not sure what Zee and Diana would have thought of each other, but somehow I think they would have figured it out. It was like Zee knew what the universe had in store for her, and she accepted it wholeheartedly. Diana is still trying to figure out if she even likes it here, and is fighting to make things the way she wants them to be. Both are actually quite noble.

Zee never needed to prove anything. She already knew who she was. Diana is still fighting for that certainty, and maybe I am too. Zee taught me how to be the bigger dog. Diana is teaching me something else

.

One day when I was walking with Zee, another dog across the street decided he didn’t like her. He went absolutely ballistic—barking, growling, standing on his hind legs while his owner tried to wrestle him back to earth.

Zee gave a surprised half-bark, like, excuse me? and looked at me for direction.

I told her to sit, and she did. She always listened to me.

“Be the bigger dog,” I told her. “Don’t let him ruin your walk. It’s a beautiful day. You’re with your mommy. You don’t even know him. Who cares what he thinks? Maybe he’s just having a bad day.”

She sat there calmly while he lost his mind.

That dog gave me more epiphanies than most people ever have.

How many times has someone barked at you for no reason and you let it ruin your mood? A stranger in a lobby. Someone at the grocery store. Someone who ignores your good morning like you personally offended them by existing. Or, if you live in Jersey, gives you the finger and asks what’s so fucking good about it.

Or someone at work who doesn’t like how you answered an email, or spelled their name, or booked their travel. You fix it, because that’s who you are. You learn, you adjust, and you move on.

But some people don’t bark because you did something wrong. They bark because that’s what they do.

Being the bigger dog is realizing you don’t have to join them. Their noise isn’t yours to carry. You can let them have their moment while you keep walking.

Zee didn’t escalate. She didn’t take it personally. She just stayed beside me, steady and calm, like he was nothing more than background noise.

And eventually, he was.

Then I entered what can only be described as the world’s most over-engineered elevator system.

Six different banks of eight elevators. You type your floor into a kiosk like you’re booking a flight, the machine assigns you a car, and still — somehow — half the people ignore this and just jump into whatever elevator lights up with their number. The result is a crowded metal box that stops at approximately ten floors on the way, with strangers breathing down your neck like we’re all late for the same very important, vaguely unhinged cult meeting.

I finally make it to my floor, heart rate elevated, patience thin — and there is no line for the coffee machine.

Score.

I line up my cup and lid like I’ve done this a thousand times. I press the button. And that’s when I see it — the blinking orange light. The universal corporate symbol for: this is broken, and we will not explain why.

Fine. I pivot. Water it is.

As I ride the coffee-only elevator back down, one thought nags at me: did anyone actually report this, or are we all just waiting for the next snack reconnaissance mission — the sacred daily pilgrimage to refill the wasabi peas container?

Because the wasabi peas are eternal.

Nobody eats them, yet they are religiously topped off (like the hand sanitizer), as if persistence might eventually convert us. They feel less like food and more like an office rule no one remembers agreeing to.

Today when I left the office, the container was empty, which felt almost suspiciously hopeful. I pictured some caffeine-deprived renegade finally snapping — dumping the whole bin into a trash bag and hoping their sacrifice might bring literally any other snack.

By 8:45 a.m., my email to the Workplace Experience powers-that-be already contained an unholy trinity of corporate complaints: a Code Brown in the first stall, a broken coffee machine, and my growing resentment toward the eternal wasabi peas.

Somewhere between the Code Brown and the blinking orange light, I could feel her forming — the office Karen. Not a monster, not a tantrum, just a woman who noticed things that were broken and couldn’t NOT say them out loud.

One minute I was a reasonable adult; the next I was Kate-from-the-35th-Floor, emailing about no almond milk, a broken coffee machine, and bathroom emergencies, wondering if the price of “free snacks” was turning me into an entitled Karen.

All of this while the 38th floor (I was told) — the promised land above us — apparently lives in a nut-filled utopia. People drift up there like pilgrims. Nuts, gummy bears, M&Ms — a full-on snack paradise.

Down on 35, we get wasabi peas and granola, day after day, as if no one eats them because no one wants to clean the container, so it’s easier to just keep topping them off.

So I’m stuck bouncing between two thoughts.

On one hand: this is ridiculous. I am a grown woman spiraling over snacks and almond milk. I get paid; I can buy my own effing snacks. Why do I feel so ungrateful?

On the other: this is a company with tens of thousands of employees and a global logistics machine — and yet, somehow, almond milk at its own world headquarters keeps running out. A firm that can track a transaction across continents in milliseconds cannot, apparently, keep almond milk in a fridge on the 35th floor.

So I’m left wondering if this is really about wasabi peas at all.

I thought I was done. I wasn’t.

For a while, my book was an active being in my life.

I was writing every day. Living inside it. At one point, I genuinely thought Patrick was going to divorce me. I was completely in it — feeling everything as it hit — and it honestly felt like it had to come out. Everything I had been holding in for decades poured onto the page, and that doesn’t happen without reliving it to some extent.

When I finally decided it was done — that I needed to stop tweaking, editing, circling — I missed it.

I missed writing every day.
I missed using every spare moment to get it finished.
I missed the way the past and the present stayed in constant conversation.

It felt a little like losing a friend.

Eventually, I stopped rereading pieces every day and shifted into the strange, quieter phase of sending it out into the world — hoping someone would see what I see in it.

Yesterday, I received deeply thoughtful feedback from someone kind enough to read the whole book. And it pulled me right back inside.

When I think about the book being finished, I feel relief — that I survived the telling of it — but also the sense that it marks a line in my life:
before writing the book and after writing the book.

I carried this for decades.
I got it out.

It isn’t solved. I’m not healed. But I pulled it out of the dark and into the light.

Survival may be the truest resolution the book offers — not just surviving what happened, but surviving the act of telling it. Letting others witness what I’ve been carrying.

And it has been heavy.

There is no closure. There will never be closure. This is a witness’s account of grief, pain, and humanity — not a story that ties itself shut.

There isn’t an answer that would ever resolve it.

My mom, Zee, and Kevin live in my heart — and I believe, in my soul — but there is an agony in longing for them to be real, here, physically with me.

Love with nowhere physical to go.

I want them here.
I want them physically here.
I want the weight, the sound, the presence — the interruption of ordinary life.

I want to walk in the door and hear Zee crying and spinning in circles, deliriously happy to see me.
I want my mom in the kitchen telling me I need to eat something, singing to my dad.
I want Kevin to be my real brother — someone who knows me because he always has.

And if I were offered the chance to live in the timeline where that was real — where they were all still here — I would go in a heartbeat.

I’m not grieving the events as much as what never got to unfold. The life that should have existed. The family that ended before it could really begin.

Kevin would have shared everything with Kara and me — our parents as witnesses to who we were becoming. Another person who would have truly known us. That thought makes me feel warm and hollow at the same time.

Somehow, I was given the capacity for deep attachment. I’m pretty sure that was my mother’s doing. Love doesn’t weaken with time. It just loses its place to land.

Some losses aren’t puzzles.
They’re landscape changes.

I can’t solve this. I can only learn where the cliffs are and build a life that doesn’t pretend they aren’t there.

My heart longs for the family that knew me before I had to become strong. That was home.

This is where I live now.

And still — I find myself wanting the universe they are in.

Buy me a Nespresso pod

We had been looking at houses in a town near the beach seriously enough that we rented a B&B there for a week. It was summer, and we were looking forward to a vacation that doubled as house shopping.

We arrived on a Saturday, excited to finally slow down and really look around. Every other time we’d been there, we’d glanced at a few houses and gone home. This time we walked, grabbed lunch, met our realtor, looked at a few places, and checked in.

The town felt quaint. Quiet. Carefully kept. Charming in the way places are when someone is working very hard to keep them that way.

The B&B was a Victorian — gingerbread trim, pastel porch, all of it carefully preserved. In fact, everything there was preserved. No siding. Just exposed wood, everywhere. Beautiful, until you realize what that means.

When fires happen there, they’re bad.
Not a house — entire blocks at a time.

Sunday morning we got up and got dressed for the beach.

The B&B had a complimentary breakfast. Patrick loved that shit. I personally would rather not eat than sit with people I don’t know unless alcohol is involved, but fine — we ate.

When we were getting up to leave, Patrick asked the hostess for the beach badges that came with our stay.

She said sure — but added, casually, that we couldn’t go to the beach until after noon.

I stopped dead.

Why?

She said it was a town tradition. On Sunday mornings, the beach stays closed. People are expected to be in church.

I remember standing there thinking:
So what, they guard it?
If you don’t go to church, you don’t get the ocean either?

She didn’t argue. She didn’t explain. It was said the way rules are when the person saying them believes in them.

I dragged Patrick to the next town over.

Their beach was open. No moral timetable. No expectation attached. I bought my own effing beach badge.

You’re not the boss of me.
I don’t play that shit anymore.

I’d already learned what happens when rules are dressed up as virtue.

That should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t.

Next came the parking.

The streets are narrow and mostly one-way. In the summer there’s nowhere to park. We were moving from a city with alternate side parking and had sworn — sworn — we were never doing that again. We wanted a driveway.

She showed us a place on a lot-and-a-half. We said, Oh great — so we could put in a driveway.

She hesitated.

Well… if I’m being honest, you’d need Town Association approval. And they usually don’t approve.

Why?

She didn’t know.

And the thing is — almost none of the houses had driveways anyway. Maybe twenty-five percent, if I’m being generous. The houses are practically touching. Some are a foot apart. Parking isn’t tight because it’s charmingly old. Parking is tight because the town was never designed for modern life. Until the 1980s, cars weren’t even allowed on Sundays.

There are also entire blocks of tent houses.

Actual tents. Permanent, wooden-framed tents left over from the camp-meeting days. No air-conditioning. I don’t even know about plumbing. Maybe water, maybe not. Supposedly there’s a waitlist.

For a tent.

We used to joke about it.

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Sheetrock salesman.

Then the rest of the rules started stacking.

They tell you what colors you’re allowed to paint your house.
You can’t tear anything down. Ever.
You don’t renovate — you restore. Whatever is there stays there, whether it works for you or not.

At that point, we were effing done.

The center of town is anchored by a long park they call God’s Holy Mile.

I called it the Green Mile (I still do actually).

Not out loud. Just privately.
It felt like a place with rules you were supposed to know already.

We bought a house in the bordering town instead.

After that, the only reason I was ever there was because it had the closest branch of my bank. I’d park, walk to the bank, walk back to my car, and leave. Even then, I’d get odd looks. Not hostile exactly. Just… assessing. Like I’d missed a memo.

Patrick, meanwhile, wanted to move there just to break all the rules on principle.

Paint the house traffic-cone orange.
Blast loud rock music.
Make margaritas on the porch.

Which is extra funny, because it’s a dry town.

At one point I was actively plotting walking onto their beach from the next town over on a Sunday morning and skinny-dipping.

Not because I wanted to be naked in the ocean.
Because the idea of existing freely in a place that tried to regulate joy felt irresistible.

I didn’t do it.
But the fact that I considered it told me everything I needed to know.

We first moved near the town about twenty-five years ago.

One day I was at my bank. I walked outside and a man hissed directly in my face.

Not yelled.
Not muttered.
Hissed.

That’s when I started calling it CT — short for Creepytown.

Later, I learned that when state psychiatric hospitals closed, many people were displaced. Old boarding houses in CT rented rooms. Some of those houses were still there when I was.

That explains context.
It does not erase the moment.

Another time, the day after Thanksgiving, I was walking on the boardwalk in CT when an elderly woman grabbed my arm and asked how my Thanksgiving was.

I said it was nice and asked about hers.

She lit up. It was wonderful. They’d gone out to dinner. They had steamed turkey. Had I ever heard of steamed turkey? It was delicious. With green beans. Cranberry. Jello.

She kept talking.

Her husband stood there silently, like he didn’t quite know who she was.

It wasn’t hostile.
It wasn’t threatening.
But it wasn’t normal.

Another day, I was walking Zee through CT. A woman stopped and asked if she could pet her. That felt normal. Zee is beautiful. People always want to pet her.

I said yes.

She stroked Zee and started telling me about her German Shepherds. She’d had two. Her husband beat them. When they were broke, he sold one. He beat her too. Eventually she left, but she couldn’t take the dog.

She told me all of this while petting my dog.

After a while, I made a quiet decision.

I just wasn’t going to talk to anyone in CT anymore.

CT wasn’t about faith.
It wasn’t about charm.
It was about rules, compliance, and control that showed up sideways.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

And I was done.

Buy me a Nespresso pod ☕️

Once, when Zee—the best dog in the world—was still alive, a friend came by to meet her for the first time. He was visiting from out of state and rode his bike over one afternoon, knocking on the kitchen door.

Zee did her usual German Shepherd routine: explosive barking, little growls in between breaths. We told her it was okay. She settled. She let him in.

He stepped inside. Zee walked over, sniffed him once—and then something changed instantly. Her hackles went up. She let out a sharp yipe, tucked her tail, and left the room. She wouldn’t come back.

We were embarrassed. This wasn’t her. She loved people. And this wasn’t a man animals avoided—quite the opposite. Dogs usually gravitated toward him. He was gentle and steady, the kind of person animals trusted without hesitation. There was nothing abrupt or threatening about him at all.

Two days later, Joe was critically injured while riding in a memorial bicycle tour honoring fallen officers. He died shortly after.

I didn’t think about Zee’s reaction at the time. Not then. It wasn’t until after the funeral—maybe months later—that it came back to me. And when it did, it unsettled me in a way I still can’t quite resolve.

Do animals know something we don’t?
Do they sense illness, or stress, or some internal shift before it’s visible?
Was Zee reacting to something already happening inside him—or was it just coincidence we stitched meaning onto afterward?

Most explanations say dogs aren’t predicting death so much as detecting subtle physiological or emotional changes: stress hormones, scent changes, something altered beneath the surface. That makes sense.

And yet.

Zee had met hundreds of people.
She had never done that before.
She never did it again.

Buy Me a Nespresso Pod ☕

The comments on the first ten chapters have been too thoughtful to ignore — I want to actually use them as I work.

I really love this community, and I’m not disappearing. I’ll keep posting along the way while the book gets its next pass.

The Sisyphus Club

To Love Is To Live

As many of you know, I am a huge fan of Dostoyevsky. His work touches a part of my soul in a way that few others can, if there are any others that can…

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3 months ago · 59 likes · 41 comments · Aaron

I was reading something on Substack today where someone was talking about how much they loved Fyodor Dostoevsky. I didn’t recognize the name at first, so of course I Googled it and realized he wrote Crime & Punishment.

Which immediately brought me back to freshman year of high school.

I was in Honors English and had a book report due. We were supposed to choose a book from the “suggested” reading list — which was actually mandatory, just presented like it wasn’t. I hadn’t read a single one of those books, and the report was due, so I did what seemed reasonable at the time: I wrote about a book I had already read.

Some trashy novel called Sunshine about a woman with a lump on her leg who ends up dying of cancer. I don’t even remember if it was good. I was much more interested in boys than books, or Honors English, or doing what I was told.

I fully expected to get away with it.

I did not.

My English teacher — who I did not like at all — called my parents in and completely lost his mind. Instead of failing me outright, he told them he’d give me time to read another book from the list and write a new report so I wouldn’t fail the project. Very generous. Truly. Such an effin nice guy.

So I had to pick a real book this time.

I chose Crime & Punishment. It seemed fitting. If I was going to be punished, I might as well lean into it

.

I hated it.

It was an old, smelly, musty hardcover that smelled like a library basement and dust. I had to read it with a dictionary next to me because this was before Google, back in the olden days. There were so many words I didn’t know, and I remember thinking: how am I supposed to write a report when I don’t even understand what he’s saying?

It took forever. I’d read a few sentences, stop, look up a word, go back, reread, get annoyed, repeat. Night after night. I hated the book. I hated the process. I hated myself for choosing it.

When I finally finished, I was so relieved that I immediately wrote my report about how much it sucked and what a complete waste of time it had been. My parents made me show it to them before I handed it in and told me — calmly, annoyingly — that I might want to rethink that approach. Maybe try to be a little more positive. Or at least less hostile.

So I rewrote it.

And somewhere in all that irritation and effort and teenage resentment, the point finally landed.

Even if you don’t get caught, you still pay for the crime. You don’t let yourself get away with it.

That was my takeaway. That the real punishment wasn’t the police or the courts — it was what happened inside his own head. He suffered more there than he ever could have if he’d just been caught.

I got an A on the report.

The following year, I dropped Honors English entirely, because eff that reading list. But I’ve never forgotten that book, or that experience, or what it taught me — even before I had the words for it.

You don’t really get away with things.
You just carry them until you’re forced to deal with them.

Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I read or listen to audiobooks. Sometimes I just lie there and pet the dog.

There’s a short window of time in the afternoon when the sun comes in through my bedroom window and lands right on my spot on the bed. If I can catch that window, I curl up like a cat, feel the warmth on my face, and pretend it’s summer. I LOVE the feel of sun on my face. Yeah—melanoma, etc.—but that’s what sunscreen and windows are for. It’s that instant warmth that feels like it radiates straight through to my heart.

I’ve always loved the sun. My poor skin. I’m much more careful now than I was when I was younger, but it almost feels like a necessity for me. The winters in New Jersey are so dark and cold that I get mildly depressed every year—actual SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). We finally invested in one of those lamps that’s supposed to help. I think it does, to some extent—but you have to get the right one. These aren’t tanning lamps; they just mimic the sun’s rays enough to trick your body into thinking it’s getting what it needs. I also take Vitamin D all winter.

Which brings me back to New Jersey winters.

I HATE IT HERE.

I completely understand why my dad went back to Florida. This weather literally sucks a-hole. Today is a rare sky-is-blue day, which is genuinely lovely and I’m grateful… but it snowed yesterday and tonight the low is sixteen degrees. So where exactly am I going? To clean off my effing car—and then right back inside.

Meanwhile, Little Crackhead is out of her mind because she needs exercise. She does zoomie laps a few times a day, but she probably hates my actual guts for not taking her out to play. And speaking of Little Crack—she pulled me over this morning. We tried a new front-hook harness, which makes it harder for her to pull, but far from impossible. A dog came from an angle I forgot to check (we’re on a corner, so there are MULTIPLE directions I have to surveil for dog traffic), and I couldn’t get her out of the line of sight fast enough. I had to wrestle her and ended up falling in the snow.

Thankfully, I was wearing the extremely unflattering snowmobile suit Patrick bought me. It’s warm, waterproof, and—turns out—excellent for breaking a fall. I’ll probably be sore tomorrow. Little a-hole.

Right now, Ariel and Little Crack are in the kitchen singing a full chorus of “Is that the mailman or UPS?” while I’m at my desk trying to write. Very helpful.

I once saw a cartoon of a German Shepherd sitting at a grand piano with a microphone and an audience in front of him. He says, “This one’s about the mailman. It’s called ‘Losing My Shit at the Front Door.’”

It makes me laugh every single time.

I didn’t know it was a cult while I was in it. I don’t think most people do.

What I knew was that my life had fallen apart in a short period of time. A long relationship ended—the kind where you think you’re building something real and adult. Within months of that, another relationship came fast and loud—flowers, dinners, fixing things, talk of moving in—and then that ended too. I wasn’t even in love. I was just trying to stay upright.

At the same time, my dad wasn’t really there anymore. Not in the way I needed him to be. I was broke, in debt, and when I asked if I could stay with him and my stepmother for a bit to get back on my feet, they said no.

So I was suddenly single, unsteady, and very alone.

That’s when the church entered my life.

They prayed for me. They told me I mattered. They told me God had chosen me, specifically, and that felt incredible. It felt like being seen again after a long stretch of feeling invisible.

They went to church constantly. I started going too. Not because I believed everything right away, but because showing up gave my days shape. It felt like purpose.

Then the rules started appearing.

Women weren’t supposed to wear makeup or pants because it meant we were trying to seduce men. Dating was watched. There was pressure to give testimony—to stand up and talk about your faith, your sins, your progress. There was spontaneous hymn singing, which sounds sweet until you realize you’re expected to join in, whether you feel it or not (or know the words).

There was constant pressure to give ten percent of your income if you wanted God to take care of you. Ten percent, no matter what you made, no matter what you owed. If God didn’t provide after that, it meant you didn’t have enough faith. You needed to pray more. You needed to go to church more.

And there were so many church things. Services, prayer meetings, Bible study, night services—it felt endless. I honestly lost track. The point was to always be there. It never fucking ended.

They talked a lot about backsliding. That word stuck to me.

I was completely addicted to cigarettes after college. I’d buy a pack, smoke a few, feel horrible, throw the rest out, promise God I was done—and then do it again. Over and over.

Smoking meant I was backsliding.
Skipping church meant I was backsliding.
Thinking too much meant I was backsliding.

They even had a picnic once and announced that no backsliders were allowed. I remember standing there thinking, of course I’m backsliding. I always am.

I cut off almost everyone who didn’t believe the way I did. Believe didn’t mean faith—it meant agreement. The only person I didn’t cut off was my sister. She never bought into it, and I think I needed one person who wasn’t inside my head.

The most dangerous thing I started believing wasn’t about sin or heaven. It was that I was untouchable.

I remember thinking I was invincible because God had chosen me. That I could do anything and wouldn’t die unless God wanted me to. And the truth is, I didn’t really care what happened to me.

Once, I stopped to help someone on the side of a highway without thinking. I didn’t even notice how dangerous it was. I could have been killed. It didn’t register.

What finally broke it open wasn’t a sermon. It was my grandmother.

My grandmother—my mom’s mother—died, and I was told she wasn’t “saved” because she was Catholic. That her faith didn’t count. I could not imagine my grandmother not going to heaven. I just couldn’t. Something in me stopped cooperating after that.

Around the same time, someone close to me got pregnant. She wasn’t married. The guy wasn’t helping. She was alone. She asked me to go with her to get an abortion.

I said no.

Not because it felt right—it didn’t—but because I believed helping her would mean I was doing something wrong. I still feel awful about that. It doesn’t feel like something Jesus would do. It feels like something fear does to you.

I didn’t leave all at once. I just went less. Then less than that. Then not at all.

Toward the end, I brought someone with me once—someone outside it. I warned him they’d try to convert him. He went anyway, won a candy bar at some church contest, and never went back. He didn’t argue. He just didn’t stay.

Years later, I found out what happened after I left.

The pastor I thought was the closest thing to Jesus on earth died of a massive stroke. His son-in-law, the youth minister, was arrested for molesting children. Mostly boys. He went to jail. His marriage to the pastor’s daughter was annulled. Apparently after over five years, it was never ‘consummated’. Another leader moved on and convinced a different church to pay for his gym membership because it was “for the body and the soul.”

It all came out.

I’m not writing this to say all faith is dangerous. I still believe in Jesus. I just don’t believe He wants you ashamed, isolated, or convinced you don’t matter unless you’re obedient.

Leaving didn’t look like freedom at first. It looked like small, ordinary things. Going to the beach. Moving my body again. Eating cheap food with my sister. Getting a cat. Letting normal life come back slowly.

If your faith requires you to disappear, it isn’t faith

.