Something happened around this time, and it ran longer and deeper than anything else on this whole timeline. I thought about leaving it off entirely. I decided that felt like a lie, like pretending a whole chapter of the book was never written at all. So here it is, marked on the date it belongs to, and nothing more.
The shape of it is here. The weight of it is here. The words are not, and they are not going to be. If you are reading this hoping the blur resolves into a story if you stare long enough, it will not. That is the point. The page exists so the date is not empty, not so the date is explained.
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Everything before this sat in one kind of order, and everything after it sat in another, and the line between the two runs right through here. I have written freely about almost everything else in my life, the games and the jobs and the friends and the long flat stretches in between. This is the one place where the honest thing to do is to say only that it mattered, and then stop.
There were people involved who did not ask to be on a website, and there are details that are not mine alone to hand out. So they stay where they are. Behind the glass. I can stand here and point at the door without opening it.
Some chapters you write down. Some you carry. This one I carry, and I just wanted the date to know I had not forgotten it.
It took a long time to be okay. Longer than I would have guessed standing at the front edge of it. The version of me that started this stretch and the version of me that came out the other side would barely recognize each other, and I think that is the truest thing I can put in plain text without saying any of the rest.
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If you know, you know, and you do not need this page. If you do not know, this is me telling you that there is a reason the timeline has a quiet, heavy spot right here, and that the quiet is on purpose. Not everything gets to be content. Some of it just gets to be true.
I am leaving it sealed. Maybe future me feels differently and comes back to open it. I doubt it. More likely this stays exactly as it is, a redacted block at the right point on the line, holding the place for a story that already changed everything once and does not need to be retold to keep doing it.
That is all there is to see. Thanks for not asking.