Before the Last Domino
The friendship that broke me wasn’t the first loss. It was the last in a long line of goodbyes I never learned how to expect.
In the first chapter of a book I am writing, a boy builds a line of dominoes across a dining table with his stepmother.
He takes the whole thing very seriously. The spacing has to be right. The bridge has to bend. And the last domino has to be different.
When she asks why the last one matters so much, he says “Because that’s the one everybody watches.”
I am calling the book The Last Domino. It’s inspired by my life, and that scene gave me a way to approach something I had been struggling to explain through essays and poetry.
When someone falls apart, it’s easy to notice whatever happened right before.
A friendship ended. Someone left. A conversation went badly.
You see the last domino fall. You don’t necessarily see the line behind it.
Much of my writing here has been about the falling. I want to tell you a little more about the line of dominoes leading up to the last one.
The First Dominoes
My stepmother was the first person whose leaving I experienced as abandonment.
When I was little, we were incredibly close. She wasn’t just my dad’s wife. She was another mother to me, and some of my happiest childhood memories are with her.
She used to pick me up just because she wanted to spend time with me. We’d go places together, take trips, and do things that made me feel special. I loved being around her, and I never questioned whether she wanted me there.
Then, when her grandchildren were born, things started to change.
She had more people in her life who needed her time and attention. I can understand that now. But back then, I was just a kid who didn’t understand why someone who used to want to spend so much time with me suddenly wasn’t coming around like she used to.
The trips stopped. The spontaneous visits stopped. We stopped doing the things we’d always done together.
I didn’t know what had changed or what I’d done wrong.
So I blamed myself.
I thought maybe she didn’t want me around anymore. Maybe I’d done something to upset her. Maybe I just wasn’t as important to her as I used to be.
I didn’t have the understanding I have now about how complicated adult lives can become. All I knew was that someone I loved like a mother was becoming less and less a part of my life.
And I missed her.
Years later, when she and my dad divorced, I had already spent years grieving the relationship we’d once had.
The divorce made that loss final. She disappeared from my life entirely, and I lost the relationships that had come with that family, too: step siblings, nieces, nephews. People who had belonged to my life were suddenly gone.
I never reached out to her afterward. By then, I’d spent so long believing she didn’t want me around that I assumed she wouldn’t want to hear from me, either.
I can understand now that her life had changed and that she had other responsibilities. But I couldn’t understand any of that as a child. I just knew that someone I thought of as my other mom had stopped being there.
There were other losses, too.
I remember going to recess one day and looking for my best friend on the playground. When I couldn’t find her, I asked the teacher on duty where she was.
The teacher told me her mom had called the school office that morning to say they had moved out of state.
Just like that, she was gone.
Around eleven or twelve, another best friend suddenly stopped talking to me, and we had been neighbors for most of my childhood.
As a child, I didn’t always understand why people were leaving. I just knew that someone could be part of my everyday life and then suddenly be gone.
Years later, my wife said she was leaving for a few days after an argument. I helped her pack and took her to her mother’s house. We said goodbye with the understanding that we would try to work things out.
She blocked me and never came back.
I never saw my stepson again either.
I had loved him like my own. He had been part of my everyday life, someone I had helped care for and imagined watching grow up. When my marriage ended, I didn’t just lose my wife. I lost my place in his life, too.
There was no separate goodbye for that relationship. No opportunity to explain to him why I wouldn’t be there anymore.
The same childhood friend who moved away came back into my life as an adult.
Later, she moved away again without telling me and then died in a car wreck.
These losses were different. Death, divorce, rejection, and someone moving away aren’t interchangeable. Not everyone who left was abandoning me.
But each left me with someone important missing, often with little opportunity to understand what had happened or say goodbye.
By adulthood, I had a lot of experience with people becoming absent.
Yet, I still wanted to believe that the next relationship could last.
The Cost of Being Known
Alongside those early losses, I was growing up gay and afraid in rural Arkansas.
I had learned early that being gay could cost me people’s love. I heard what people said when they thought nobody like me was listening, and I was taught that being gay was something you could change.
For a while, I tried to build the life I thought I was supposed to have. I’d married my wife hoping I could make that life work, and over time, I grew to care about her.
I was also overweight and ashamed of my body. I carried that shame into how I saw myself and what I thought other people could possibly see in me.
It was difficult to reach for belonging when I was afraid of what being fully known might cost.
So when I eventually found friends who accepted me, that acceptance meant an enormous amount. Four friends, especially, gave me a sense of belonging I hadn’t really experienced before.
One of them became someone I thought of as a brother.
For once, I could imagine being known and still being wanted. I could be myself and have a place in someone’s life without feeling like I had to hide something.
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After years of fear, that felt possible.
The Brother Who Became the Last Domino
But the friendship I had come to depend on most would eventually become the one that hurt me most.
For years, he was one of the closest people in my life. I thought of him as family. He knew I was gay, knew what I’d been through, and knew how much it meant to me to have someone who accepted me as I was.
And for a while, I believed he did.
But that acceptance didn’t last.
He began using his newfound religious beliefs to justify rejecting me for being gay. Someone who had once made me feel safe and accepted was now treating a part of who I was as something wrong.
The first time he turned against me was on my birthday.
He had ghosted me all day. When he finally spoke to me on the phone, he ended it by telling me, “I’d see you in hell but I’m a Christian now.”
Those words came from someone I considered my brother.
And it didn’t happen just once.
He would leave, sometimes suddenly, and then come back into my life. Each time, I wanted to believe things would be different. I wanted my brother back. I wanted to believe the person who had been by my side was still there.
But the cycle kept repeating.
There was emotional manipulation, too. At times, he threatened suicide, including situations involving a gun. Those experiences were frightening, and they made an already painful relationship even harder to navigate. I was trying to cope with being rejected by someone I deeply cared for while also being afraid of what might happen to him.
I don’t think I fully understood how much damage those years were doing while I was living through them.
I kept forgiving him. I kept trying to understand him. And every time he returned, I let myself hope that maybe this time the friendship would last.
Eventually, the friendship ended for good.
By then, I wasn’t grieving one goodbye. I was carrying years of them, all from the same person.
And what made it especially devastating was that he knew exactly what being rejected for my sexuality meant to me.
He had read Franky My Dear, I’m Gay, and we’d spent hours talking about the experiences I’d written about. He knew the fear I’d grown up with. He knew how much I’d struggled to believe I could be fully known and still loved.
He became someone who reinforced the very fear he’d helped me overcome.
That was the last domino.
I don’t believe his judgment determines my worth. But knowing that doesn’t undo what it meant to hear it from him.
To understand why I fell apart, you have to understand both things: what he did was deeply harmful on its own, and it reached years of hurt that were already there.
When the Past Meets the Present
What followed was one of the most difficult periods of my life. And much of what I’ve written here on Medium came out of trying to survive and understand it.
I was trying to describe experiences while I was still having them. I didn’t always have the distance to explain how they connected.
In The Fake Brother and the Real Friend, I wrote about that loss, dissociation, and another friend’s efforts to help me through it.
But being cared for didn’t immediately make it easy to feel safe. That period was difficult for the friend supporting me, too, and I became afraid that struggling would cost me that friendship as well.
In How We Wait, I described the difference between waiting for an answer and waiting for reassurance that someone wasn’t leaving. That piece came from a time when a friend in our small group suddenly stopped talking to us for more than a month, leaving another friend and me waiting to hear from him.
In When Your Body Doesn’t Believe You, I wrote about knowing my best friend cared about me while reacting to a change in our routine as though I was losing him.
Those pieces belong to the same story.
A late call wasn’t only a late call to me in those moments. Silence could bring back the fear of someone disappearing before I knew I was saying goodbye.
Sometimes my reactions seemed much bigger than the situation in front of me. But I wasn’t responding only to what was happening. I was also responding to years of experiences that had taught me how suddenly someone could disappear.
I could recognize that the person in front of me hadn’t done what someone else had done. I could understand his explanation and believe he cared. Even then, I sometimes couldn’t feel reassured.
That gap was frightening. It also made me ashamed, because I was afraid of hurting or exhausting someone who was trying to be there.
Writing helped me describe it. It gave me somewhere to put what I couldn’t always explain aloud.
More Than What Happened to Me
Looking back, I don’t want to disown those essays.
The person who wrote them was having a very hard time. He was trying to understand himself and make himself understood. There are things I might express differently now, but I remember why he needed to write.
I also want to give those pieces more room around the edges.
They capture moments when pain filled much of my attention. Read together, they can tell you a great deal about what frightened me without telling you much about the rest of my life.
I love people. I build things. I have work I care about, ideas I want to pursue, and things that make me laugh. Those parts of me were here while I was struggling, too.
I want more room for them now.
I want time with the people I love without spending so much of it watching for signs of an ending. I want to write about other things because I have something else to say, without feeling that I first have to finish explaining why I hurt.
I don’t have a tidy declaration of recovery to offer. Understanding more hasn’t made every reaction disappear. But it has given me a way to look back with more compassion, and a clearer sense of what I want to move toward.
The book begins before the boy knows how many people he will lose.
For an afternoon, he has a table full of dominoes and someone beside him who wants to help. He explains how the bridge works. She listens. They build it together.
I wanted to begin there because those moments deserve a place in the story, too. The people who left mattered for reasons that existed before their leaving.
At the end of the chapter, his stepmother stands the last domino back up. He knocks it over again, and she claps.
Then they begin rebuilding the line.
When I think about that scene now, I find myself paying less attention to the last domino.
I keep thinking about her sitting beside him, asking where the next piece goes.
