At the beginning, I had finally found someone.

Someone who chose me — to be around, to talk to, to laugh with, to listen to music with, to drive with.
At the beginning, we drove a lot.

We were careless kids. We played video games together. We were with each other nearly all the time. When an opportunity came to live on a farm in Vermont, we took it without hesitation.

For two and a half years, we explored everything.

We drove through the mountains constantly. We kayaked. We went to the coast. We walked through a battlefield and stood in the open field. We walked sunlit farmland. There was a small private creek where we spent summers. Another patch of land held fiddleheads she loved to pick and cook.

I don’t know what to call that except paradise.

When it was time to leave, a mobile home was waiting — our first real home.
We came back. I finally went to college.

We had one kid by then. We had a huge television and a DVD player. One of our rituals was simply watching a movie together. That’s what we were doing the night my oldest was born. We had just been to Home Depot. Her water broke. He arrived in our house before we could reach the hospital.

Life with a baby was harder than I was prepared for. He screamed every day. We struggled. But we kept going.

School was hard. I loved it. She didn’t. She enjoyed taking our son places, but she was alone a lot. Neither of us was very good at making friends. She spent much of her time with her mom, who lived nearby.

We still enjoyed each other’s company. We didn’t fight much. It was still good.

We had goats and chickens. Dogs, cats, birds. Our son loved the animals. He loved being with his mom.

I graduated in April.
I got a job in June.
Our second son was born in August — early, premature, in the hospital for a month.
In November, Trump was elected.

During that time, the election of 2016 reshaped much of the country’s emotional landscape.

My mom was already gone. Around that time I learned my father was dying of cancer.

I quit the job.
I fell into a deep depression that lasted two years.

Then we got a new house — cheap, but big. Two bathrooms. A garage. Space for the kids and the dogs. The edge of the forest pressed up against one side of the property, giving us a kind of privacy that felt important then, even if I didn’t know why.

At first, things were okay.

I went to work.
She took care of the kids.
Sometimes I made dinner.
Sometimes I came home to an empty house.

When I broke my leg, the mattress on the floor made it impossible to rest, so she brought in a small bed and set it along the side of the room. It was meant to help. It was also the first time the room began to feel divided.

She loved animals. She rescued baby starlings and raised them. They learned to talk, like parrots. The closet filled with rats, living their strange, busy little lives.

She let them crawl on the bed.
They pooped everywhere.

One day, I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I moved my small bed into the other room.

From there, the good moments grew thinner. Mostly it was down. We were still in the same house, but not in the same place. Eventually, the marriage collapsed. I slept in the other room until I sold the house.

During the divorce, she moved into the cabin I live in now — her mother’s place. She would drop the kids off with me every weekend. The weekdays were empty. No friends. My parents were gone. I had drifted away from my siblings over politics. The weekends were bright, and then they ended, and I would get high after the kids left.

Now I’m in that cabin.

My kids are here.
My ex is here.
Yes, it’s awkward as hell.

And I’m lonely.

From the outside, this is just a list of events.
From the inside, it was a slope.

A slow change from something that once felt like paradise
to something I no longer recognized.

That’s what this is about.
Not what broke.
But how the ground slowly tilted.

If this resonates, you might want to read my first essay on rebuilding after loss.