Life held no meaning anymore. I tried to imagine living without him, and I just couldn't. He had become everything good, the embodiment of hope, in my life. Without him.....it was too horrible, but more than that, I didn't even know where to start. There was nothing. I would never bear children. Would never marry or be anyone's wife. Would never love again, ever, ever, ever. I never wanted to love anyone again. This was more pain than I had thought anyone could endure. I felt as though my life had been shattered into the tiniest shards imaginable and there was no putting it back together.

In a surreal, dissociated and strangely lucid moment, I suddenly realized that Humpty Dumpty had never fallen. He'd been pushed. And like him, I could never be put back together. I saw him in my mind, falling off of that wall, over and over again. My heart, fracturing into particle fine as dust. There was no fixing him, or me. Broken, and I didn't care. I didn't care what happened to me anymore. The only thing I had ever wanted was gone, gone without even the courtesy of an explanation, of coming to tell me himself. Gone, happy and carefree and not even missing me, living as though I'd never existed, while here I was, mangled, bleeding like an animal hit by a semi alongside the road but not quite dead yet. I wanted to scream, and scream, and scream with all my might, to go out into the woods and scream like an animal, but my mouth was silent while I screamed inside in the static that had engulfed me.

Life went on as usual around me, but I didn't notice, and when I did, it hurt, so I closed myself away from it, turned inwards. Didn't look at people, didn't talk to them. Everything I looked at reminded me of him anyway. Even the sky was the same color as his beautiful eyes. The trees we'd sung songs about...everything echoed Daniel back at me. It was unbearable. I didn't care if I cried or not, in fron of people or not. I made an appearance on Sabbath for our worship time, but I was far away. We were supposed to sing, but I just sat or stood as the tears ran down my face silently. I couldn't sing. Couldn't talk about anything much, just the bare minimum. My head was scabby. Picking the scabs off, sliding them down and off the strands of hair they surrounded.

There was no solace anywhere, but when I was alone, curled up in my bed, at least there wasn't extra pain. When Mom saw me crying, she grew impatient and sharp, told me I was sinful, because crying for a man who was married to someone else was adultery. I was commiting adultery. I didn't care. Didn't believe it anyway, but more than that, I didn't need salt rubbed into my wounds. Country music played sometimes in our room. Sarah played it. I ached along with it, with Randy Travis, George Strait, Reba.....but especially Randy Travis.

But mostly I cried and ached quietly and wondered how on earth I could go living, why Yahweh had punished me like this, what I had ever done to make myself so detestable, what the point was in anything anymore. Even Job got to keep his wife. Why had I been created to be so strange, so different, that no one could love me, and then, just as I'd found someone who did, that brief window of happiness, to have him snatched away from me, the one person who'd like me for what I was.....why had I been tormented in ever meeting him to begin with. Why would Yahweh torture me like this? Why, when I tried so hard to do what was right? Why had He made me at all, if He knew I could never be loved or accepted? What kind of a cruel joke was this?