For the first time since Lisa died, I feel like life is worth living. Which makes me realize fully that I didn’t really believe it to be worth living up until now. I wasn’t living. I was just subsisting. Not dying. I was an automaton cycling through my programming, a clockwork golem clothed in skin and bones.

Nadia puts fire in my belly. Or, at least, a spark in my chest.

But that’s problematic at best. Because…Lisa.

She’s in me. She’ll always be in me. She’s woven into the DNA of who I am. Missing her is like breathing. She was my true love, my one and only. I promised her till death do us part, and I fucking meant it, goddammit, I just never anticipated that particular vow would be tested. Richer or poorer, sure; I’ve been poor my whole damn life, and while I wouldn’t mind trying rich I know it ain’t gonna fix the problems inside me. In sickness and in health, yeah. Easy. I’ll sit at her bedside and bring her soup and take her temperature and I’d even wipe her ass if I had to.

I didn’t get that. We got to be a little less poor, a little more comfortable. There were flus and stomach bugs, and blowout fights over dumb shit after which we made up delightfully, sinfully, endlessly.

But then she died, and she’s gone, and I vowed till death do us part. I vowed.

Death parted us.

I know, I know, I had that dream. But it was a stupid dream, dammit. It wasn’t really her, visiting me in my sleep. This ain’t Ghost. It was my subconscious playing idiotic games with me.

I was fine subsisting day to day, going to work and coming home alone and being celibate and drinking myself to something like sleep, waking up and doing it all over again. Repeat as needed until I go to heaven or nirvana or wherever, and I get to be with her again.

Then Adrian sent me to this cabin, and then he sent Nadia to live next to me, and now I don’t know which way is up.

Because I could…I could imagine her being something that comes before THE END.

When I threw that one red rose and that handful of black loam onto the polished cherry wood coffin, that was me writing THE END. On me, on her, on us, on my life as I knew it. It was over. The rest was just filler, details not worth remembering. There would be no after.

And then Nadia.

Coffee. Pasta. Mimosas. A hike around the lake.

A few little things. I don’t know her middle name. I’ve never held her hand, or even thought about what she looks like naked. It’s not that.