PART ONE: AMOXAPHOBIC
CHAPTER 1
They say, “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
And I can attest to that. Because that’s exactly how I died.
It happened in a car.
Deacon beside me—my blue-eyed angel, my husband.
I was too high—on cheap cough syrup and chaos.
He was low—dragged down by the weight of loving someone lost in the fog.
We were buzzing like flies in a sealed mason jar,
banging against glass we couldn’t see,
spinning in circles, hoping chaos would crack the lid.
I couldn’t face reality.
He couldn’t face the cost of staying with someone who wouldn’t.
And then—
from the pitch-black hush of night—
came the reckoning,
came the rapture,
came the unraveling of everything I thought I knew.
Number than numb,
adrift in that eerie stillness where time forgets to move,
I heard a voice that didn’t need sound:
“It’s happening. This is it. This is your time. This is your exit.”
There was a shift. A flicker in the atmosphere. Like something ancient had noticed me and decided it was time.
The silence wasn’t peaceful. It was surgical. Precise. Like a scalpel slicing through reality. And just like that—I was gone.
CHAPTER 2
We made it home, but I didn’t recognize the place. Not the walls. Not the air. Not him.
I looked at Deacon, and all I saw was a ghost. A puppet of flesh and memory sent to keep me from noticing the truth: That I had already crossed over. That the world I knew was over. That I wasn’t alive anymore.
I told him. I told him he wasn’t real. Told him this life wasn’t real.
He looked at me with those shattered eyes, the same ones that once held galaxies. But I couldn’t believe in galaxies anymore.
Maybe it wasn’t him at all. Maybe it was Hell—wearing his face to comfort me. To confuse me. To keep me soft while it dragged me deeper.
We separated within the week.
I had told him once: “You’ll have many loves in this life, but you’ll be my last.”
CHAPTER 3
When we were One, our love burned like a star—and when the end came, our own light collapsed the same way.
It became a black hole.
It pulled in everything it could: light, joy, sanity. What was once dazzling and full of dreams became dark and hauntingly void. Silent. Final.
With nothing between us but anger and blame, I had no choice—I had to go.
The cold took over. Then came silence.
I moved back home, but it wasn’t home any longer. Old friends who had once acted as guardian angels welcomed me and offered me sanctuary. They said their home was open, that I could be free to grow. But the house was not a home. It was more perilous than they let on. My new shelter was a mess—cramped, chaotic, and loud.
I thought the familial bond would ground me, but the ties felt more like bondage than love.