ESSAY:

It’s finally the truth. I decided to call it out. And continue with my life.

For those who tampered with my peace. I thought I’d leave off on an honest and perhaps beautiful note — a small essay of sorts. A truth about me.

These are my favorite fish — goldfish, of some sort. Their tails are V-tails, long and trailing, the way certain beautiful things move through the world.

What you cannot see is the most beautiful one I ever laid eyes upon. It was an all-black goldfish. He swam alone in a rather small tank, in Victorville, California — and in that hard, sun-bleached city at the edge of the Mojave, he was all velvet. His scales moved like sullen lightning beneath the water, slow and private and beyond extraordinary. He reminded me of the black goldfish in Fantasia, and I wanted to take him home so badly that I returned to that fish store for a week, just to stand before him and believe what I was seeing.

This goldfish is one of those things that will never tarnish in my mind. He remains fixed there — luminous, and unreachable, and so beautiful. Many things are this way in my life. Many I am longing to return to, or hope against hope will find their way back to me. And there are many that are gone that I find myself still lamenting in quiet rooms, and at odd hours. Anyone who knows me understands: I carry things for a long time. I am faithful to beauty, even when it costs me.

Today I secured the last of these — the most significant of the sad trinkets my heart has gathered. I doubt I will ever be open like this again. I believe this is the most profound heartbreak of my life.

You meet someone so beautiful that the bond becomes indescribable. You are certain it can last a lifetime — the love, the admiration, the loyalty, all of it present in the same moment as the weather gathers before something major transforms. Such friendships are rare. And yet sometimes something prevents what ought to naturally unfold — not out of strength, but out of fear, or smallness, or the quiet failures people carry.

It was out of my hands.

What is more remarkable is this: I hid myself from what I sensed would cause me pain. I did it long before I truly knew them — I left, I closed the door for three years. And still they returned. I know they felt the tie between us. Imagine looking at someone and understanding, in your soul, that this particular beauty will cost you — and running as far from it as your legs will carry you. But if you are meant to know someone, life has a way of folding the distance. That was us, and our strange beginning — intense, humorous, warm — and real.

I could feel this person’s kindness from the beginning, and I trusted it. I still do. But I no longer trust what stands around it, or what shaped the outcome. I cut off the tie.

People do not sabotage what they truly love. Not gently, not quietly, and certainly not over time. That is not love. It is fear wearing love’s face, need dressed as devotion, control calling itself care — a vine that climbs by tightening its hold.

I had beauty, for a little while. A friendship that made my heart sing the way it had not in years. I made some of my finest work in the hope of its bloom — and some of it simply because I wanted to show my care, it’s like leaving flowers without a name. I believed I had a friend.

I hate war. Emotional or otherwise. It is a wilderness I never chose. I’m peace loving.

I thought I left this kind of thing behind decades ago, when I was younger and believed people generally meant what they said, but were undisciplined. I know now that some never learn to mean anything at all.

I felt hurt.

Now I must live with that — and with this vision of beauty, and of a friendship that came so close to being something lasting it was almost unbearable. Perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps I always have been. But I would rather be someone who loved honestly than someone who avoided feeling altogether.

I have known great beauty —

though I have not often been allowed to keep it.

Thankfully, it is over. If I ever hear from them again, it will mean something real remains — something willing to stand in the open.

Life is too short for cruelty and confusion. It is also too short for the slow diminishment of something that never asked to be involved in dramatics. Last, it is definitely all too short for standing in doorways, blocking out the light, out of fear. And at the end of the day? Geography is a poor excuse.

I did not invite this. I mind my own. AND That was crazy.

I am not ashamed.

I am sad. And I remain, despite everything, astonished — at how difficult it can be for people to choose honesty. Or kindness. How difficult to have integrity and even a little class.

Now I can continue to heal, and carry the quiet hope that one day, courage will meet me where I stand.

I have always admired that.

M.C.F.

April 29,2026

Image by Brian Wangenheim