My woman and I met under some pretty shitty circumstances. Basically, it was a case of one saint entering my life just as another was departing, and I couldn’t make any sense of it. We got together just as my mother was succumbing to cancer, the last in a long line of maladies that no one should ever have to bear. It was my first death. I was horrified by the mechanics of true loss and withdrew into a place I never knew existed. Not even the rampant power of my woman’s beauty, honed by her own fear and anguish, could find a way to reach me. I was wasting away slowly into nothingness, while she found a way to barely hang on. The honeymoon was over long before it had begun.