Other diaries in this series are: Fade to white, Somewhere warm, Day to day, and Haunted. They discuss my former partner of six years, her transition to living as a woman in 2009, and her death in January of 2013.
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The one email account only goes back to 2006, although this is a new kind of eternity in digital time. I sift through hundreds of chat logs the way archaeologists uncover cities and deal with many of the same problems: is this room an archive or a trash pile? Methodical, colonial analysis. Mark with string and stakes, brush away dust and catalog items. This period of my life seems to exist only in faded photographs. There is no audio until sometime in 2007 when I started going out on my own—which I never did—to listen to a friend play guitar and that was probably when I tried to end things. Of course, she didn't hear me even when I jumped up and down in huge snow drifts screaming I can’t marry you. She was quite committed to being a boy at the time and insisted I stay and continue my role of Good Likely Wife. Every day she was making this possible by alienating me from people who might have guessed there was a problem. I was allowed to have friends, but those friends were always treated with uncomfortable suspicion, if she acknowledged them at all.