October 6th, 2025 - Amarillo Boulevard

Dear TNY,

I missed it by one day, but that was because…I don’t even fucking know, to tell you the truth, gaps in the goddamn memory, I guess.  I’m here now with “Amarillo Boulevard” and it’s not worth anyone’s time.

Too many characters right out of the gate and too much going on as well.  I couldn’t tell anyone apart or what anyone was doing so there was no purchase to lay my investment on. 

That’s enough of that.

Last night a thing happened.  I’m not going to get into the details of the thing.  But I saw her, man.  I saw her through a new window, one that allowed me to see her the way everyone else sees her.  All the people that warned me about her so many times.  Hell, even her family.  But I always said, yeah her behavior isn’t great, but deep down in there is a beautiful person and if she’d shuck that outer shell, she’d be brighter than us all.  To be fair, I still believe that.  But what I saw last night was the show.  I saw the show the way everyone else sees the show.  And it was horrifying.

And you know what?  I wasn’t angry.  I was sad.  It was like watching a hostage video except it was just one person, the hostage and the kidnapper.  I could see the hostage, but the kidnapper did all of the talking and now I’m afraid that the person I love is locked in a basement like Room and I’ll never see her again.  Never experience her warmth.  Or any of that brightness.  Her touch.  Her open-faced laugh.  Her roughness.  Her little feet or small wrists or tiny waist.  Her messes in the kitchen or the way she eats food like it’s a miracle in her mouth.  I’ll never see that person look at me the way that she did when no one else was looking, when I had full access to her vulnerability, when I could trace all the lines of her pain back to their sources and I so desperately wanted to pluck them out of her so she could leave the room and see the sky again. 

But this is no longer possible.  The kidnapper has the mic.  The kidnapper doesn’t know it’s the problem.  The kidnapper keeps the show going because without the show the kidnapper would die.  And the kidnapper has a self-preservation mechanism all of its very own now.  Say what you want about alcohol, it exists outside my body.  I can end it.  I don’t have to tear myself into pieces and try to rid me of my own kidnapper.  I’ve already done a lot of that work.  It isn’t easy.  But I’d rather live in pain, with the alcohol, than to live inside the show.  The show seems like a bottomless pit that gets wider and wider at the top.

So yeah, I watched her slip away.  Like the person I’m in love with was never really there at all. 

And I’m sad about that, as I said.  But what made me more sad was realizing upon waking that I had done this same thing to others before.  Hurt them very badly.  I was the show.  And I didn’t know it.  I was selfish, unaware, mean, inconsiderate, a liar, and I’ve done that more than once.  Karma is here, fellas and fellettes.  I’m serving my time.  It is NOT nice.  What I did to people was terrible now that I can see it from the inside.  The kidnapper looks like a sociopath, devoid of any real human operation.  And to everyone but the kidnapper, this is plainly visible.  But I was wrong.  And I’m so sorry for what I did to those people and all the feelings I’ve hurt along the way.  The last one was a big dinger.  Dimples like potholes and a body like a pro rugby player.  The smile and attitude of a sunny, May day.  Always so much promise.  And I wiped her out.  But it was then that I started changing.  And it takes a long fucking time to change.  And I’m not better, there is no better.  There is only growing further away from the kidnapper.  Putting space and time between.  And letting go.  Giving up.  And giving yourself away.  If I keep on this path I might be an okay person before I’m dead.  Maybe.

But I won’t be the show.

I just feel so bad.  I thought I could save her. Fucking Artax in The Swamp of Sadness.

You know, I got shittalked to the other night by a friend.  Which is typical behavior for her.  Argue for the sake of arguing.   And she said, “Maybe you don’t need to save everyone, or better yet, maybe not everyone needs saving.”

It really stuck with me.  The everyone not needing saving.  And the next morning I woke up and realized two things.  1)  I was raised to be a superhero by all the stories I read and movies I watched and watching my own father destroy his body so we could eat and stay warm (my mother sacrificed too, I’m just talking male figures here now, okay).  And 2) I don’t know a single fucking adult that doesn’t need saving.  Not anyone that I’ve ever fucking met.  Including the woman who was doing the shittalking.  You can see it everywhere you look.  The people who are so convinced they don’t need saving are usually the ones that need it the worst.  So I sit at this campfire that night and get belittled for trying to make an individual difference in other people’s lives?  That’s how we live now, I guess.

I need saving. 

The hostage in the basement needs saving from the kidnapper.

I did try.  Tried harder than I have with anyone ever.  I got her close, had her arms out the basement window and almost had her free.  But the kidnapper came in, doused the lights, and dragged the hostage back into the darkness.  And even though it was full dark, I could still see her glowing through the window.  An angel. 

So that’s that, as they say.  I turn away from the show and work on being more giving, more patient, more kind, and walk down this road a little further.  It’s just so fucking devastating.  I feel like I left a family member behind.  The family member.

But I have work to do to keep going.  And in the distance, I can see this trail just keeps heading up, and up, and up.

Nick