Licking Love From a Blade

I can still feel the night everything shifted—the night I got the phone call that my ex Nick had died. It hits me in the chest every damn time, like someone reaching in and squeezing something I didn’t know was still alive. I was at a bar in Kenosha, Wisconsin with a Turkish friend, pretending I was fine, pretending I wasn’t about to make some really bad choices. I was a version of myself teetering on the edge of something stupid, and instead I fell straight into a pit of self‑pity and regret. The atmosphere of that time was desolation. Nothing else fits.

When I saw the prompt for this challenge, I dug through old writing—half‑finished drafts, abandoned notes, scraps of younger versions of me. I found one line buried in something I wrote years ago, a moment I’d forgotten I ever tried to capture. I stole it back for this piece, because it’s the only part of that old writing that ever mattered.

It was the night we were barely twenty‑two, just kids who thought the world would wait for us. We were outside under the stars, leaning against a tree, and I don’t ever remember feeling anything like that before or since. It wasn’t something you grow out of. It was something that carves itself into you, quiet and permanent. Sometimes I think that was the first piece of steel I ever carried: the proof that something real had existed, once.

The hardest part wasn’t just that someone I had known my entire life was gone. It was that I had a child with him, and I would never hear his voice again. Never hear him laugh, never hear him bullshit, never hear him promise he’d get clean. I hid from everyone that I wanted him to come to Wisconsin, to come be with me and my kids and his son. I wanted him to choose us. I wanted him to choose himself. He didn’t get the chance.

The moment I realized I had to change or I was going to break was ugly. I didn’t get out of bed for several weeks. I took an insane job that chewed me up, made me lose weight so fast people thought I was sick, and wrecked my back—or made the wreckage worse. I was on my own. No cavalry. No soft landing. Just me and the hollow space where his voice used to be.

What became my steel wasn’t heroic. It wasn’t inspirational. It wasn’t some phoenix‑from‑the‑ashes bullshit. I just tried to remember him the best I could and keep his memory alive. That was the only thing I could hold onto without falling apart.

But I lost something in the process—a piece of me no one else will ever know or understand. Something private and sharp and gone. What I gained wasn’t strength. It was deep sorrow. The kind that settles in your bones and doesn’t leave.

How does that steel show up in my life now?
It doesn’t.
It still hurts.

If I had to describe the steel I forged, I’d call it meticulous—every edge shaped by grief, every line carved by the things I couldn’t change.

And if I had to leave you with one blade‑sharp truth, it’s this:
Love shouldn’t feel like you’re licking it from a blade.