Anatomy of Hope's Death

Preface (For the One Who Might Someday Read This)

If you ever read this, I want you to know I do not hate you. What happened hurt me deeply— and it hurt my wife too— but the hurt is grief, not anger. I understand, even in the parts you didn’t say aloud, why you pulled away: the fear, the overwhelm, the suddenness of intimacy that your nervous system couldn’t hold. That doesn’t mean I believe the way it ended was right; there were gentler, clearer ways this could have unfolded, ways that would have spared all of us some of the pain. But even so, I don’t see you as a villain or regret knowing you. I only hope you heal from whatever wounded you long before we met, and that your future brings the steadiness, safety, and love you deserve. This piece isn’t written to blame you—only to name what the moment felt like from where I fell. I will love you, always, my hearth is always open for you, and will warm you whenever you need it.

---

There is a pattern I keep meeting. A script that feels rehearsed by the universe itself. It starts the same way every time: finally. Finally, someone who seems to see me clearly. Finally, someone who doesn’t flinch at the parts of me I’ve learned to hide. Finally, someone whose words feel like the eight notes my nervous system has been waiting decades to hear. They match with me in sexuality, in intensity, in softness. They mirror what I love. They speak the language of care the way I write it—fluently, confidently, as if they have lived in the same emotional country. They talk about boundaries and consent like they are sacred. They talk about trauma with nuance, about openness with reverence, about honesty with a kind of gentle certainty. They tell me I’m beautiful in the exact way I’ve always secretly hoped I might be—not as a compliment, but as recognition. They echo my values back to me and say, “I feel that too.”

They speak—to both me and my wife—in the language of future. They make promises about stability, home, safety. They talk about seeing us long-term, about joining our life, about joy that stretches into years. They weave the kind of future you only dare imagine when someone else says it first. And because I am who I am—because my love is not tentative or rationed—I believe them. I match the weight they bring. I rise to meet the level of intimacy they set. I let myself trust that maybe, maybe this time, it’s real.

It goes perfectly. For a while. Long enough that “good morning” and “good night” become ritual. Long enough that the promises of “someday” start to feel like gentle inevitability. Long enough that my wife and I begin to picture this person in the small domestic moments—the ones you can’t fake if you don’t mean them. She saw them as a friend. As potential family. As someone who could have been woven into our life with laughter and softness and patience. She opened in ways I haven’t seen in years. She let herself believe, too.

And then—the rug pull. Sometimes it begins quietly: a slowed reply, an offhand message, a softness cooling around the edges. Other times—and this time—it is a sudden reversal so sharp you hear the whiplash in your bones. One day, the future is alive with us in it. Two days later, the door is closed. Not gently. Not gradually. Just closed. The affection stops. The warmth evaporates. The messages shift from “I love you” to something clipped, administrative, like you’ve been recategorized from “beloved” to “duty.”

And the reasons, when they come, follow the familiar script: “I realized the pace was too fast.” “I need to step back.” “I can’t meet your level of emotional openness.” “I don’t want to be responsible for someone else’s growth.” And maybe all of that is true. But I need to name the other truth: they were the one who set that pace. They were the one who made those promises. They lit the fuse and then were startled by the fire. They built the intimacy brick by brick and then called the house overwhelming. From my side, it feels like watching someone press the gas pedal with confidence—“this feels right,” “this is real,” “this is safe”—and then blame the car for moving forward.

And I am left trying to reconcile the person who spoke of home and safety and future with the person who now speaks like a stranger. My wife felt it too. She wasn’t just losing a partner—she was losing a friend, a possible future family member, someone she trusted enough to open parts of herself that rarely see daylight. She is grieving, in her own way, the same promises spoken to both of us. And what do you do with grief that wasn’t just yours? What do you do with the knowledge that someone’s departure didn’t just break your heart—it shook your household?

I know people change their minds. I know fear is stronger than idealism. But there is a particular cruelty in promising tomorrow and then disappearing today. Not malicious cruelty—just the quiet kind, the kind born from overwhelm and avoidance and the inability to hold steady when intimacy becomes real. I don’t hate them for it. But the wound is still real. And it opens something wider inside me—something older than this moment. A philosophical vertigo. A sense that I am watching, again, the fault lines in humanity reveal themselves. Not because one person backed away. But because it keeps happening. Over and over. Enough times that I can no longer tell where my personal heartbreak ends and the species-level pattern begins.

It makes me question whether the love I offer—the vast, oxygen-level love that has lived in me since childhood—is something anyone is built to hold. I keep wondering whether my love is a trauma response. Whether the intensity I carry is simply the shape my survival took. Whether the way I attach is more burden than gift, even when it’s returned with equal intensity for a time. And yet… isn’t that its own lie? To say my love is fake simply because someone else couldn’t carry it? Maybe the truth is this: I love deeply because I am alive deeply. Because I feel in seismic ways. Because sincerity is not a strategy—I do not know how to love halfway.

But what do you do when you love like that in a world that rewards the opposite? This is where the class piece enters, uninvited but unavoidable. Because sometimes I wonder if fairy-tale love—the kind that lasts, the kind with stability and security and staying power—isn’t really about compatibility at all. Maybe it’s about privilege. People with money can weather storms without breaking. They can take space because their lives don’t collapse when they do. They have bandwidth. They have safety nets. They have time. But those of us who live close to survival—financially, emotionally, physically—our hearts are always already cracked open. We have no buffer. No margin. Our love is built in the trenches, not in the quiet rooms of stability.

And so our fairy tales always feel temporary. Not because they’re fantasy—but because the world keeps proving that only the privileged get to keep their miracles long enough for them to root. It is a cruel thought. I don’t know if it’s true. But grief pulls these thoughts out of the dark places where they normally stay folded. And while I’m here—in this despair, in this wound—I need to tell the truth of it: I wanted the fairy tale. I didn’t want the mansion or the money or the perfect life. I wanted love that stays; love that is eager to be close; love that feels like oxygen, not rationed breath; love that shows up, that repairs, that continues even when overwhelmed.

I had a glimpse of it. A taste. Enough to know what my heart has been starving for. And losing it—losing the version of it that was offered so confidently—hurts in a way I do not have language for. It hurt my wife too. Watching her grief layered against mine feels like a second heartbreak stacked on the first. She didn’t just lose a partner—she lost the hope of a family she had started imagining. She lost a friend. She lost the vision of someone who could have been woven into our home with affection and safety.

In these moments, I find myself slipping into something deeper than disappointment. It’s not just personal grief; it’s a kind of philosophical vertigo. The floor doesn’t just fall out from under this one connection — the whole structure of what I’ve believed about humanity shudders with it. I’ve spent so much of my life insisting that people can be better than this. That care is possible even in a world soaked with cruelty. That if we name the harm clearly enough and practice mercy diligently enough, we can interrupt the cycle. I wrote a whole book on that conviction. And yet here I am again, staring at an empty chat window, watching the timestamp under the last “I can’t wait to see you” drift further and further into the past, and what rises in me is not a sermon about growth. What rises is: maybe I’m wrong about us.

Not just about this one person, not just about this one pattern, but about the entire project of believing humans can learn how not to devour each other. When the same wound reopens enough times, you stop calling it an accident. You start calling it what it is: design. Maybe we aren’t worth saving. At all. There is no hope at the end of this. I’m not going to pivot into uplift. I’m not going to say that heartbreak makes us stronger or that pain refines us into better people or that “one day we’ll look back and understand why it had to happen.” Maybe we won’t. Maybe it didn’t. Sometimes suffering is just suffering.

My words will fall on silence. My book and feeble attempt to make a difference will fade into nothingness and meaninglessness. The people who needed it might carry a sentence or two for a while, and then those will be replaced by other voices, other frameworks, other languages for the same ache. In the grand timeline of the universe, my work will register as less than static. And as I lay here, contemplating the darkest thoughts, I find myself circling the same question: Why? Not “Why did they leave?” or “Why do people do this?” — those answers are almost boring by now. Fear. Shame. Immaturity. Hunger. Habit. All the familiar suspects. No, the why that haunts me is bigger, colder, less interested in closure: Why does any of this exist at all?

There is no satisfying answer. Humanity exists because of an accidental arrangement of atoms near the start of the universe, because of a chain of improbable survivals — a planet at the right distance from a star, a sequence of chemical reactions in a shallow pool, a series of organisms that managed not to die long enough to reproduce. Somewhere in that long, indifferent chain, a fish crawled out of water and eventually became us. We wrote poems and built cities and invented algorithms that can destroy our attention spans in under thirty seconds. None of it was planned. None of it was earned. We are the consequence of physics, not the intention of anything. This isn’t nihilism for effect; it’s the numb confession of someone who believed too long and lost too much. Life is suffering.

But there is no greater purpose to this suffering. No divine syllabus explaining which lessons we’re supposed to learn from being abandoned, from being exploited, from being betrayed by those we trusted. No guarantee that “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” instead of just… more tired. We tell ourselves otherwise because we have to. We say pain builds character. We say heartbreak teaches discernment. We say trauma can be transformed into wisdom. Sometimes that’s true. Often, it’s just a story we use to make survival palatable. We need those fairy tales. We need those stories. So we repeat them, we share them, we rewrite them into wholesome children’s movies where the good guys win and the bad guys lose, where the betrayal is always followed by an arc of redemption, where the lonely character finds their people in the end.

We raise a new generation on those stories. We tell them life is worth living, that true love exists, that positive beats negative if you just keep trying hard enough. We tell them the purpose of humanity is to grow and learn and change. Isn’t that such a wonderful thing? Such a wonderful lie. We are selfish. We are immature. We are cruel and torturous. Of course, people will say there are exceptions — the ones who volunteer, who donate, who show up, who hold hands in hospital waiting rooms and bring soup to doorsteps in winter. They’re not wrong. Those people exist. But standing here, in this moment, I do not think the good outweighs the harm.

I am not saying humanity deserves to suffer or be punished, as if some cosmic judge is waiting to hand down a sentence. This isn’t a courtroom. It’s an autopsy report. What I am saying is that humanity may deserve to end — not in fire and punishment, but in mercy. In the quiet extinction of a failed experiment. We destroy the planet, we destroy one another, and we never change. Not really. We innovate our tools, but not our conscience. We upgrade our devices, not our capacity for care. We keep finding new ways to inflict old wounds. We have become the machine, endlessly grinding life into ash. If there were mercy in the universe, perhaps it would let this experiment rest. Not as revenge, but as release. Not as divine wrath, but as a kind of euthanasia for a species that cannot stop hurting itself and everything around it.

And this is the part no one warns you about: when someone pulls away from a polyamorous connection, they don’t just leave one heart behind. They leave a constellation. A home. A future that had already begun stitching. The philosophical despair comes next, quiet but insistent. Because every broken promise echoes a larger truth: we are so good at saying the right things. We are so bad at staying. Humanity excels at speaking care into existence—performing tenderness, scripting love, imitating the shape of commitment. But when the moment arrives to actually hold that care through discomfort, fear, or growth—so many people collapse. We vanish. We flake. We withdraw. We choose silence instead of presence. We choose comfort over courage.

And every time it happens, something inside me asks: why do we keep doing this to each other? Why do we build intimacy like scaffolding and then abandon it mid-construction? Why do we run from the love we claim to want? Why do we hurt people not out of cruelty, but out of cowardice disguised as self-protection? And if enough people do this—if this pattern replicates endlessly—what does it say about us as a species? I don’t want to condemn humanity. But my hope is threadbare. My belief in our capacity to be better is quieter than it usually is.

Ethicism tells me care is still possible. That conscience can survive even in ruins. That compassion is a discipline, not an accident. But today… today it feels like a fever dream I wrote to survive the world, not change it. And yet— and this is the part that anchors me— I do not wish suffering on the one who hurt me. Not them. Not anyone. Because the machinery consumed them too. The fear, the overwhelm, the learned avoidance—they are symptoms, not choices. They are caught in the same system that hurts us all. This doesn’t absolve them. But it humanizes them. And humanization is the last thread of belief I have left.

So where does this leave me? Here: in the aftermath. In the silence where “good morning” used to live. In the space between hope and resignation. Grieving not only the loss of a possible future, but the loss of the illusion that love—true, oxygen-level love—is guaranteed to last when it finally appears. Because the evidence suggests otherwise. The evidence suggests that we grow only when forced, learn only when cornered, change only when the cost of staying the same outweighs the cost of transformation — and even then, only sometimes.

We need those lies, though. Without them, the full weight of reality would crush most of us. We’d see the machinery too clearly. We’d notice that most of what we call “meaning” is patchwork stitched over chaos. Without those narratives, many of us would look into the mirror of existence and see nothing worth continuing. Maybe that’s the final mercy: that the lie survives even when belief does not. That the stories keep moving, even when the storyteller collapses. That somewhere, a child is still watching a movie where kindness wins and thinking, “I want to be like that,” even as I lie here wondering if any of it is real. Maybe the point was never that the stories are true. Maybe the point is that they are necessary. Not for the universe. For us.

Maybe the fairy tale isn’t a lie. Maybe it’s just a privilege. Maybe some people get to keep it because their lives are built on foundations that don’t collapse under the weight of intimacy. But those of us with trauma-shaped hearts? Those of us who love with the fullness of everything we’ve survived? We live in a different kind of story. One where the real miracle isn’t staying— it’s daring to love again at all. And I will. Not because I believe today. But because belief is not required for care. Only courage is.

Let the world keep its fairy tales. Let others keep their hope. I will sit here, in this shadowed chapter, naming what I see. And somewhere else—in another heart not yet hurt—someone will still believe in love’s possibility. Maybe that is enough. Not redemption. Not repair. Just coexistence: between those who still believe, and those who—for now—cannot.

**Author’s note:** This piece is written from within pain—not as a call to end it, not as a philosophy collapsing into rubble, but as the record of what a heart sounds like when it breaks in a world already burning. It is a chapter of despair, not a conclusion. A snapshot of what hopelessness feels like while it’s still happening.