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I really don't want every post to be a miserable experience for people who choose to read the text, but I'm still on the ground floor of the death of my grandmother.  Dismantling her life is quite a process.  She had begun to hoard things pretty significantly in the last few years, on top of being regularly scammed & hiding it from everyone.  To the tune of many thousands of dollars.  There are so many extremely predatory companies out there that target old people who are desperate for some kind of hope.  Publisher's Clearinghouse, for example.  Of course what they do is perfectly legal.  It's just EXTREMELY predatory.  The actual scammers are almost better because they're just basic evil.  A company that's predatory is evil with a side order of banal officiousness.  

Even if you put aside all the weird things she had been relentlessly buying she also just had a lot of random stuff.  Things she had legitimate reason to have, like crafting materials, but also a library of crafting magazines she was going to read someday.  A day that never came.  

Then there are the piles and piles of sentimental things.  She kept every birthday card she ever got, thank you notes, anything you can think of.  She had almost every piece of homework the Teen ever brought home when she was very little.  I have the thank you note I sent her from my high school graduation sitting under my computer as I type this.  I remember writing that note.  I couldn't tell you anything about any of the others, but as soon as I saw it the memory of writing it was crystal clear in my head.  Sitting there trying to decide what to write that would make my grandparent laugh...  Sitting at the table, with my Pilot pen, in a blue flannel shirt.  

I can't let it go.  This bit of paper that was little more than trash to me 4 months ago is now something I can't bring myself to toss in the garbage.  As I hold it I'm suddenly back in 1994.  In our house in Garden, a month or so before my Uncle Jason died.  Unaware of how terrible a really tragic loss was.  Having never lost someone I loved unexpectedly.  My head is swimming from the relentless flood of memories.  

All of the things that led me to you all started right after I sent this card to my grandparents.  It's not connected to those events other than being from that time, but I had those memories set apart, and now they aren't.  

The family I lost, the girl I never got over, the job that traumatized me...  A decade or so of life that savaged me, and set me on the road to this moment, where I'm talking to you.  It almost seems preordained as I sit on the floor, in the managed disaster of my current life.  

I'm 18 years old and everything is possible, & 46 and the doors have shut, at the same time, with this folded bit of cardstock in my hand.  

What if I had been better, stronger?  What if I had been able to hold on to her?  Together we could have been amazing.  The comic would be the story of our struggles.  Or maybe it wouldn't exist at all.  We'd be working for Disney & stopping the downfall of Star Wars & Marvel...  

Then again, maybe I can still be amazing on my own. 

"For oft from the darkness of hearts and lives
Come songs that brim with joy and light,
As out of the gloom of the cypress grove
The mocking-bird sings at night."