Her Artifacts Lost, Volume 1 - The Vanishing Vial

To The Only Man Who Shattered My Heart of Garnet

I think you're the first person who ever broke my heart. Perhaps there were fractures in it.

But you broke it to pieces.

That's saying quite a lot. Because well I have had a lot of people in my life that I've loved. And who have loved me. And who have walked away.

I'm a very strong person. I had to be after all I've been through. And you shattered me to pieces.

Your presence in my life and sudden absence were the catalyst I needed to actualize my future. Perhaps you were meant to be the one who got away. The only person close enough, strong enough, and important to me enough to decimate me and render my Tower, my Ego, to ruin.

I was already barely holding on. Holding on to my dream with all of my might. Trying to keep my fake, two-dimensional personality together.

I had you all fooled. I smiled and was cheerful. I could take on incredible loads of work. I summoned forth the best in me every day to be larger than life.

Because I wanted to show you that your dreams were possible.

I was unreal. A fantasy.

Underneath it all, I was fighting every day to keep myself together. I was a terrible writer. A lousy programmer. An inconsistent leader. I didn't even have enough mental bandwidth to learn anything new.

So when you saw the truth of me, you decided that it wasn't what you wanted. You wanted the fantasy.

Maybe you wanted to believe that greatness is inherent.

It's not you stupid idiot. Greatness is the thing that develops when you take the shattered pieces of your life and you hold them in your hands, in tact, even as they cut you and you bleed open in front of others.

When I bled open in front of you, you cast me aside. Like the stupid collared shirts you wore off your fucking back.

It was this rejection that sealed my fate. It destabilized me so much that it caused my spirit to leave me. I broke with reality to the point where the spirit of Allister found me. The spirit I believe to be my son.

In this way, I still can't tell what you are to me. I have hoped and begged on my knees to God that somehow, you could be my friend.

Because I can't stop believing in you. The real you. Your dreams. Your creativity.

And I can't see what you did as anything other than a gift. No matter how painful it was.

For the vision of and communion with Allister, kept me alive. Even after the dream I had worked seven years for was decimated. An acquisition went through causing me to get laid off two months after I finally broke into the AAA game industry as a writer. Even as my body systems began to fail and I had nowhere to run because I was collapsing from within.

The dream of being a wife and having a son kept me alive. Through every brush with death.

And it was you who gave me that dream. The dream of my son.

You inspired in me the courage to organize a great tangle of myths which will be this book and many subsequent books and series. Your rejection of yourself and what you truly wanted pushed me to continue holding on.

I am a writer. That's what I am first and foremost. And I believe you are one too. And I will write. And I won't stop writing and I'll be better than you'll ever be. Because someone has to keep our dream alive.

It's alright. You can leave it to me. I'm used to taking on the baggage of cowardly people.

I had hoped you'd changed. But you're still the same stuffy, asshole. All that ambition, all that depth, and a nasty, pretentious Ego.

Just because you have "Dr." in front of your name doesn't make you important.

Unfortunately, you will always be important to me. I wish I could say otherwise. You stupid bastard.

To the end of my days, I will always regard you as a friend. And maybe that's what friendship is. When a person sees the ugliest side of the other and still has hope, love, and care in their heart for them.

I still see the pure boy that lives in you. And I hope maybe one day, I can invite him to tea. And we can play again. Make things go whoosh.

Only on this day, will I know friendship to be magic. And if not, I will resolve myself to the belief that friendship doesn't exist.

That the maintenance of a person's pride is more important than their duty to another in friendship.

I truly hope that I'm not wrong about you. I truly hope that you are indeed who and what I think you are. I truly hope that you are my friend.

Because after all I've been through, I could use a real friend. And maybe you could use one too.