(Originally posted 5/17/26)
So stay with me, and I’ll have it made
When I was a much younger man, I met an amazing woman. She was brilliant, funny, and fearless. She was beautiful, but didn’t think she was. She had a smile like the sun breaking through clouds, and if you could make her laugh, her face lit up like a pinball machine when you when a free game. (Yes, I stole that from Grant Naylor. No, I’m not going to apologize.)
And for some reason, she liked me. We had the same taste in almost everything. I’d mention loving an obscure movie, and it was one of her favorites. She’d make a deep-cut literary reference and I’d be the only person in the room who got it. I made her laugh, and she loved the stories I told. I loved merely being in her presence. We were both part of the online scene, so we introduced ourselves by our nicknames—she was Sidian (a character from a book she loved) and I was Murphy (from Murphy’s Law). I always called her Sid, and she always called me Murph. It took us months to learn each other’s real names.
Early on, I came to a realization. I was fucking terrible at relationships. (So was she.) I really enjoyed being around her, though, so I came to an absolutely insane decision: I wasn’t going to try to make a pass at her, I was going to try to be her friend. (It helped that she was so far out of my league the distance could be measured in parsecs.) I just loved being in her presence so much that I didn’t want to fuck it up, and I knew I couldn’t help but fuck it up.
You didn’t have much to say, but you were beautiful anyway
Somehow, it worked. The fact that I’d never made a ham-fisted attempt to convert “geek girl” into “geek girlfriend” like 97% of the guys in her arc earned me a measure of her respect. We became close friends. I would’ve taken a bullet for her—and while that’s usually just a figure of speech, once I very nearly actually did. A guy she broke up with went over the high side, threatened to firebomb her house, and through a series of ill-advised events, I came within about ten seconds of getting mag-dumped by a police officer and would’ve died with a hilariously stupid expression on my face. It’s a ridiculous story I might share eventually, and certainly one where the news clippings would’ve been passed around on the Internet for people to laugh at. But if she hadn’t put her hand on my arm at the very last moment, I would’ve absolutely gotten jumped by Mr. Dead, as the Tribe Who Stayed would put it.
For years, we were partners in crime. But time passes, and things change. We both got involved with other people; we both ended up moving away. I moved across the country to be with a woman, who, it turns out, only wanted my assistance in trying to beat her younger golden-child sister to the husband/house/baby trifecta. When her sister won the race, I was surplus to requirements and was cast aside. Sid got married and had a daughter, and then her husband died. We both moved back home within the same week out of the blue, and our friends took it as some kind of herald of the End Times.
This time I’ll try to be more beautiful and more amusing
Everything shifted back into a familiar groove for a while. It was like we’d never left. But we were older, and life started doing its thing. The group eventually drifted apart, and we began to be in touch less and less frequently. I got wound up in my own problems, caring for a parent who was disabled, and had precious little time and energy to spend on my own happiness. Sid ended up moving back across the country to be with her family. Weeks between contacts became months, became years.
She eventually wrote a couple of books and sent them to me. I think she was trying to prod me to take a real swing at my own creative endeavors, which I’d been hoarding like jewels, never showing to anyone a la George McFly. I never did get around to putting my works out there, but it did spur me to write more. Even though we’d grown distant, I thought of her often, and knowing she was in the world was one of the (fewer and fewer) things I still liked about it.
Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone
One day last year, I started getting spammed with attempts to log into my Facebook account, which I’d deactivated and abandoned when I got sick of political shit. I finally decided to open it back up and change the password and lock it down. When I did so, a notification popped up from a mutual friend. It said, “I just found out Sid passed away.” And my whole world depressurized.
Nobody knew she was sick. She’d kind of dropped off everyone’s radar, and hadn’t reached out to let any of us know. I like to think she just didn’t want to burden any of us; there’s a tiny part of me that worries maybe she thought it had been so long, we wouldn’t care.
If I’d known, I would’ve dropped everything and headed for her bedside in a moment. Maybe that’s one of the reasons she didn’t reach out; she didn’t want muggins here uprooting his entire life in some tiresome gesture of adoration to her.
In some loyal heart, is your memory enshrined
I went on tilt for a very long time. Frankly, I can’t say I’m not still on tilt. I got blackout drunk for the first time in my life; I sobered up and felt miserable, then I did it again. Barely held it together for the first week. Then that Friday I was driving home, and the YouTube Music algorithm decided to kick me in the teeth. It threw me “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor (I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend / but I always thought that I’d see you again) and then “Blister in the Sun” by the Violent Femmes, which had been the anthem for a late-night road trip a few weeks after we’d met. While our friends slept off the drive, we’d sat out on the beach while a pre-dawn storm rolled in, talking and sharing. She pointed out the stars of Orion’s belt in the sky above us and told me if I ever felt lost or lonely, to find those stars and know she was looking up at them too. (I so very nearly blew the “don’t make a pass at her” rule before I came to my senses. To this day I keep one of those star apps on my phone so I can find Orion at any moment, even if it’s cloudy or he’s on the other side of the world.)
And then I pulled up at a light, and the algorithm went for the throat. “No Rain” by Blind Melon. The night we met, I ran a gaming session for her and what would become our circle of friends, and she and I stayed up past dawn talking about philosophy. She pulled out the CD, which she’d bought earlier that day on the strength of the single and put it on. And she absolutely hated every other track, getting more and more annoyed as she kept skipping. She griped about it for days. And from then on, I’d always associate the single with her in my head. I still think of her every time I hear it, and I know she’d punch me in the arm for that.
So there I was, about to completely break down in my car, when a flash of light caught my attention. It was city council election season, and a bunch of roadside signs were reflecting the setting sun at me. And one of the candidates was a man named Derrick Murphy. And the light reflecting off the sign obscured the last letter, so I just saw, “Murph.” I can count the number of people who called me that on one hand, and nobody ever said it with as much affection as she did.
And I felt for a moment like maybe she wasn’t completely gone. I could almost hear her laughing in my ear, telling me to get over it.
And I laugh at myself while the tears rain down
So it’s been sixteen months since she left. And I’m getting by. I’m still moving, but things have changed. To put it succinctly, I just no longer feel like I have a dog in any given fight anymore. Events just sort of wash over me; I feel like I’m a curious observer rather than a participant. Good news, bad news, it doesn’t really matter to me, because I just feel disconnected. The only person I ever really loved unconditionally and the last person who really knew me is gone; now I feel like I’m just marking time until it’s my turn to come home from the circus.
Please don’t get me wrong— I’m in no way suicidal, nor do I feel depressed. I still get a great amount of enjoyment out of life. I’ve always focused on the small, simple things instead of what other people would consider life goals. An afternoon thunderstorm or an encounter with random wildlife will fill me with an enormous sense of well-being. I have plans; I’m going back to school in order to further my career. I look forward to things in the future. I’m actually writing again, too. I started self-therapy by putting down the stories of our times together and my memories of her, and eventually it morphed into a work of fiction, where I’m cringe-makingly basing characters and events loosely on my own past. I love life enough that when it’s time for my ticket to get punched, they’re going to have to bring up the house lights and the music and probably even break out the big Vaudeville hook to pull me off the stage.
And besides, if I pulled the ripcord just because I was sad, she would never let me hear the end of it. So I’ll keep passing the open windows. Like the third gambler in the story, I shall finish the game.
But when it is my time, I’m not going to be precious about it. I don’t particularly fear the end of the story, because I know one of two things is going to happen. Either I’m going to get to see someone again who I love dearly and intensely miss… or I’m going to stop missing her.
And if I can’t have the one, I for damn sure want the other.