I am on the plane returning from Florida…a trip that has always and will most likely will always remind me of you.  So many times I thought about you in the past few days.  When the palm trees swayed.  When I heard music outside by the Tiki Bar.  When I breathed the tropical air and saw motorcycles riding down the street.  (Not one Goldwing, though.). I found myself thinking often about what it would have been like if you hadn’t died.  And if I hadn’t wanted you / needed you / asked you to leave.  Would I have still been considering a life in Florida?  Some of those old feelings came back.  

No sobs though.  No bad dreams.  No random, painful thoughts.  Just a quick self-check on where I am because of your choice, wrapped around what kind of person I have become because of it. Am I stronger now?  Damaged somehow?  A better person? I hate these questions.  The answers are always elusive and probably always changing anyways.

I just finished a book on killing.  I’m sure that would be of no surprise to you as you are very familiar with my morbid curiosity.  There was a section on murder-suicides, which made me again question whether my life was ever truly in danger with you.  I tell people that I was.  People tell me I was.  I try to imagine you doing that to me and I have to admit that I don’t think you would have. Murder-suicide makes you the villain and me the victim.  Suicide makes you the victim and invariably points to me as the villain.  In your lucid, calculated days, this would have been your goal.  

I keep thinking that your respect and love for me might have mitigated that and once again, I find myself wanting desperately to know what you did after you woke up and I left that morning.  Did you go for a ride, start to change your mind, and then come back?  Deep down inside, I know the answer.  You had already made up your mind the evening before.  You woke up, didn’t even put your socks or shirt on.  Pulled your gun out of your vest, which you left in the kitchen, laid on the garage floor, put the gun to your temple, and pulled the trigger. In the morning. Five hours before I came home. I always come back to this narrative.  It’s really the only one that makes sense.

If you wanted me dead, you had many opportunities to do that, but that wouldn’t have gotten the result you wanted, would it?  If you had killed me before yourself, everyone would have viewed you as the monster and felt sorry for me.  No “In memory of the Scotty D or “the banana.”  You would have been the bad guy.  You were smart.  You knew this is not the way you wanted people to think of you.  Narcissistic people don’t kill the people they victimize.