Dead To Me – Epilogue – This Is A Love Story

Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate, because the title is going to piss some of you off, and I’d rather deal with that now than let it fester. 

This isn’t a story about betrayal. There’s no backstabbing, no cheating, no dramatic “how could you?” moment in the rain. If that’s what you’re here for, fuck off to the next shelf. 

This is a love story. A big, stupid, messy, all-consuming love story. The kind that rewires your DNA and makes you believe in things you swore you were too cynical for. The kind that feels less like falling and more like finally coming home to a place you didn’t know you’d been searching for your entire life.

So why call it “Dead to Me”?

Because people are liars, that’s why. 

We lie about what we want. We say we crave epic tales of woe and heartbreak, stories of lovers torn apart by circumstance and their own terrible choices.

 We say we want to watch the world burn. But we don’t. Not really. What we actually want, what we’re desperate for, is proof that the good stuff is real. That someone can look at you – all your freckles and your weird anxieties and your terrible taste in music – and decide you’re worth building a life around. We want to know that kind of devotion exists, even if it’s just for a little while.

But a story called “The Big, Beautiful Love I Had That Was Wonderful and Then Ended Tragically” doesn’t exactly fly off the shelves, does it? 

It sounds like a pamphlet. It sounds like something you’d skim in a therapist’s waiting room.

 “Dead to Me,” though? 

That’s a hook. It’s sharp. It promises conflict, blood, a satisfying revenge arc. It makes you lean in. It makes you *need* to know what he did.

The truth is, the title isn’t about what he did to me. It’s about what I have to do for myself.

 It’s the cruelest, most necessary act of love I can perform for the man I still adore more than my own heartbeat. To love someone that much, and then to lose them, is to live with a ghost. A beautiful, perfect ghost who never gets the chance to disappoint you, to get boring, to leave his socks on the floor. 

You build a shrine in your heart and you guard it with your life, and in doing so, you kill your own future. You keep the dead alive at the expense of the living.

This story is my memorial. It’s me taking our love – all of it, the mundane breakfasts and the earth-shattering orgasms and the stupid fights about which way the toilet paper roll should face – and putting it on paper. Giving it a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

So I can finally close the book. 

So I can say, “Thank you. You were everything. And now, you have to be dead to me. Not because I don’t love you. Because I love you too much to let your memory be the end of my story.” It’s the only way I know how to honor a love that big. By finally letting it go.

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