TW/CW I talk about the death of my partner in this. 

I’ve mentioned a few times on social media that I’m going through a nasty divorce. My soon-to-be ex-husband wasn’t a good man, and I got tired of how he was treating me. I spent a couple of months formulating an escape plan when a well-meaning triage nurse reported my ex for domestic violence just a few days before Christmas last year and everything blew up in my face. But this essay isn’t about him or the fallout from leaving him when I did and the way I did. It’s about the person I found after, who sadly didn’t make it. 

Part of why I left my ex was because he refused to allow me to transition. He wouldn’t let me work, either, as he refused to pay for childcare so I could get a job. And when I found jobs that would allow me to stay a stay-at-home parent, he sabotaged those efforts. So the day I left was also the first time I ever got to be who I really was. I immediately joined trans groups, to make trans friends, and that’s when I found the man who was going to be my boyfriend. 

Kai wasn’t perfect; none of us are. But his imperfections weren’t dealbreakers, like my ex. And while we did fall for each other fast, like with my ex, it didn’t come with red flags that felt like butterflies. There were no excuses for things I had seen in my ex that I hand waved, as I was fleeing a troubled homelife when I started dating him. It felt like I had finally wound up where I was supposed to be. Kai loved me as I was, imperfections and all. He didn’t only love his favorite parts of me, and he never tried to change me. instead he accepted me as I was, and not who he wanted me to be. It was such a startling contrast to my ex that I couldn’t help but love him. 

Kai’s death was unexpected. His last words were he didn’t feel well and was going to lie down. And then he was gone. Hearing about it from his nesting partner was shocking. We hadn’t even hit the six-month mark. We’d already bought Christmas gifts for each other, gifts we were planning to exchange when I went to visit him for the first time since we had met online. Sure, we’d known each other six months, and dated for 5.5 months, but it still hurt. It wasn’t just losing him that hurt. He was the first person to love me the way I’d always wanted to be loved. He accepted me the way I always wanted to be accepted. And to lose him so quickly after spending a lifetime of accepting that I wasn’t worth even basic human decency, it hurts. 

My friends were shocked. One of them confided in me that if they’d read that kind of twist in a book they’d have thrown it down and never read anything by that author again. That kind of tragedy, after so much I’d managed to survive before I met him, wasn’t supposed to exist. 

The hardest part in all of this is that life still goes on. It doesn’t stop for anything, not even when you’re grieving someone you’d never expected to find. I still had chores to do, I still had homework, I still had to take care of my kid and make sure we were both fed. Even now, I’m stumbling about in a haze as I do what I can to keep going. Everything makes me think about him. Everything makes me miss him. That’s not even taking into consideration the election, which has left me wondering which rights I’ll lose first. That was even one of the last things we talked about. How that, at least if he were to go, he’d be surrounded by the men who loved him the most, and he had no regrets. 

It’s hard to not throw in the towel. My ex has been fighting me over custody, even though he’s abused our kid too, because he thinks people are possessions for him to do what he wants with. And there was the briefest of moments where it all seemed like too much that I debated giving up and handing her over. Because I know the universe isn’t kind, and I know society is cruel, but this was too much. Going into her room to wake her up in the morning for school, to see her holding the stuffed animal Kai gifted my daughter under the guise of being a friend, it’s unbelievably hard to accept that he’s gone. The only reason I haven’t given up is because I’ve come too far to throw in the towel. I’ve survived so many horrors from early childhood, it would be a shame to quit now. 

I’m no stranger to grief. I know that it never goes away, and that you learn to live with it. That sometimes, when you’re not expecting it, it rears its head no matter how much time has passed. And I know how to handle those days. I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy working on myself, learning how to function with the weight society has placed on my shoulders. I also know, though, that it won’t always be so immediate. That eventually I’ll become numb to this and it will be easier to go on. But all I can really think about right now is how unfair it all is. 

I don’t really have advice to give at this moment. We all grieve differently, and I’m too caught up in the process to logically lay it all out. I’m too busy trying to keep existing to be practical about the whole mess. I just know that I miss him. That for all we only knew each other for six months, there is a hole in my heart shaped just like him that nothing else will ever really fill.