I want to start this out with an apology.  To my loves: I am sorry for comparing our relationships to an impossible standard, one that you could never meet because it is so idealized.

The trope of “The One Who Got Away” is so common as to be laughable – this idealized version of a relationship that never was, or, in my case, the relationship that was, but then, through no fault of the parties involved, was not.  Death kind of has a way of ending things like that, without closure for the living.

Minx and I, we had big plans for the future.  Big, grand, glorious plans of spending the rest of our lives together – that kind of plans.  She got to spend what was the rest of her life with me; I, unfortunately, did not get that same luxury.  So I am stuck with these grand and glorious plans – and no way to know how they would have panned out in the end.  Maybe they would have, maybe they wouldn’t have.  No way to know.  But they are stuck in my psyche as the way things should have been.

And no one can measure up against “should have been”.  It’s a downright impossible standard.

I love you all – you are my future.  I need to let go of what “should have been”, because you are all my present, my wonderful “what is”.  I could not ask for better.