Back in the days before the world turned to absolute crap, before 9/11 and before I met my first husband, I was involved with a group of game designers who became very good friends. During that time, I was dating a guy who was not good to me, and during Origins Gaming Convention that summer, while my boyfriend was busy ignoring me and doing whatever it is that he did while he was being his wretched self, I sat in the halls of the convention center and the hotel, sometimes in the Looney Labs Great Experiment room, sometimes in the basement of the convention center, talking with Kory Heath about games and life and design and dreams and being. And when we got back to the DMV, I broke up with the wreched boyfriend and dated Kory for a while. It didn’t work out, as happens with young relationships often, and then 9/11 happened and then I met my ex husband and my life with the gamers was over because I was, apparently, attracted often to men who would have me for themselves and not share me with my friends, however good those friends were.

We’ve been going through our stuff, like you do when you’re going through a move, and I came across some games that Kory wrote, and I thought about reaching out but I thought it would be too strange, all these years later. Social media is weird because you feel like you’re still connected to people you’re not really connected to, through mutual friends, and you feel as though you can always reach out or reconnect whenever you want to or whenever the timing feels right.

Kory lived with chronic pain and depression and he ended his life last week, just a week after I thought about reaching out, and I’ve been living with the awful feeling of what might have gone differently if I had gotten past the strangeness and actually sent a message. I tried to get through the week talking to friends and burying myself in work, but by Thursday I could not anymore. Kyle suggested I take Friday off and my boss was OK with it. I went to therapy with Dr. C. and the Amazing Therapy Dog Wallace, and then headed to the farm to get away from social media. It had not been helpful that other friends from the same general group of people had died in previous years and there was just post after post after post of friends talking about missing friends who had died and being so devastated at Kory’s death.

And I don’t even feel as though I have any right to write anything about it. But here I am.

My plan to head to the farm and sit in the grass and watch the sky turn to dark and watch the stars was thwarted by the rain, snow (wintry mix?) and cold. I ended up just heading into the house, unpacking the car, and doing some chores from the list. I eventually fell asleep on the floor mattress in the great room and slept the sleep of depression and chronic pain, waking every few hours to adjust, being sad, and falling back to sleep.

The next day, Kyle showed up with the kids. Kyle had gone down earlier in the week to meet some arborists who took down some of the trees that were encroaching on power lines. He and the kids moved a bunch of the logs while I pained a baker’s rack that I bought at the ReStore that someone else had painted yellow. I forgot to take photos of the painted item but I have the original photo that the ReStore had posted online. I think it’ll look really good when it’s dry.

I took the kids home to our current house that night and Kyle stayed overnight to finish with a bunch of the wood. One of the guys is going to come back to cut the walnut trees into boards for us to dry and eventually turn into furniture. He also got some pretty amazing photos of the sunrise from our front porch, and managed to find the drive in movie theater.

There’s some more–some design things I’ll eventually talk about but this is enough for now. Just too much sadness right now to talk about designing kitchens.