Greetings from the end of the world.

Three months ago today, the world ended.

You may not have realized this. In fact I meet people every day, laughing, worrying over useless trivialities, hurrying off to meetings that don't really matter - going about their usual daily business as if nothing ever happened.

Frankly, I understand the confusion. It's easy to see why so many could have missed this seismic shift in the universe: the skies didn't come crashing down, there was no hail of fire and brimstone to herald the occasion. No angels descended, nor demons rose; no bugles screamed out to the heavens of the unfairness of it all.

In fact, to most of you, it probably just seemed like any other day.

But the world ended all the same. My world, anyway.

At about 2:21 that afternoon, deep in the dark heart of Emory Hospital here in Atlanta, my partner, my best friend, my soulmate, my everything, was taken by the greedy nemesis leukemia. She'd been fighting it for 8 years, and winning, but this time... this time, just when it seemed things were turning for the better again, her cowardly opponent came from behind, or inside, and overwhelmed her, taking her lungs, her very breath, to stop her fighting back.

Three days on a ventilator. Lungs getting better, but the kidneys and liver pulled a double-cross and gave up the fight on their own. Flip of a switch, a few more raspy breaths, me holding her hand and begging for what I knew would never happen. A single tear sliding down her cheek. And she was gone.

She was Lynder, known to some of you here as the blipper White Balance, the eternal optimist with a penchant for shots of her own feet and neverending updates on her many grandchildren. She was briefly a regular here, before those very same grandchildren started taking more and more of her time, until there was just not that much left for blipping. She still took about a million pictures a day - she just never got around to sorting and uploading anything.

We were together for fifteen years. She was the light to my inner darkness, the sun to my moon. She was the always-friendly social butterfly who could make friends with a fence post, balancing out the cloistered hermit lurking inside me. She was my constant aggravation and yet my constant solace, the last beautiful voice I wanted to hear each night before sleep, and the only one I wanted to wake me in the morning.





She was my True Love, once and always, and I am lost without her.





The old world ended. And with it ended any belief I had that there is any innate goodness in the world, that love will conquer all, that everything will work out in the end. If anyone ever deserved good things to happen to them, it was her, and yet they rarely ever did.

The world I move through now is a cold and lonely place - darkness and chaos and despair. People say it will get better, and I'm sure over time the edge of the knife will dull with familiarity. But I have seen the world for what it really is, and once opened, I think that door can never be shut again.



Those of you still living in that old world - stay there as long as you can. Hold on with both hands to whatever joy you can find, and don't ever, ever let go.

It'll all be taken anyway, soon enough.









I love you, Lyn.
Truly, Madly, Deeply.