You hear a faint typing noise.

Until Batrick died, I was vaguely angry at most aspects of Texas government, and blisteringly irate at a few of them, but was not really thinking in terms of it being a direct threat to people I knew, or that my staying here would be considered a tacit endorsement for living in Texas, thus making me a threat to my friends - a thing which is Utterly. Unacceptable.

But their death really woke me up to the fact that the estimated 3 THOUSAND preventable deaths per year in Texas was not a flaw in the public health plans of those in power. It was a feature. A deliberate and eugenicist decision was made that me and my friends, through no fault of our own, should die, because we take up resources that could be used to give tax breaks to oil companies that pollute and warm our planet, weapons manufacturers that kill its populace, and data centers that are driving up prices for electricity and clean water. That Bat’s death was by design made me so … verklempt with rage, and fear for my friends, and guilt for my own complicity, and even gave me fear for myself. Maybe I had those feelings before and just didn’t know - alexithymia is a motherfucker like that.

My relationship with Ghost was already starting to get alienated and distant when Batrick died, and if divorce became likely, I would not be able to support myself to anything above the Medicaid “donut hole” coverage gap. So I was dealing with naming my feelings in my grief-processing protocols, and kept coming up with all this tangential shit about my marriage, my life circumstances, and my location that I wasn’t expecting to find, and most of it was … not great.

Texas was making me feel all these things and I could finally recognize all of those feelings that were in my body without my knowing it, and it was pretty shitty that in addition to my friend being dead, I had to have even more feelings about him being stochastically murdered by fascist health policies.

And dealing with the fear, the fact that I’m not a badass anymore, nor capable of financially protecting my friends, nor blameless in my choosing to stay and fight giving cover to making others like Bat feel safe enough to stay when he should have left … all of that required getting the hell out of Texas and rearranging my life to deal with those risks (which is an ongoing project, but that’s another entry).