Things did not go smoothly at first.

I had a break down.

A catastrophic breakdown.

It took a few months before reality set in that I was effectively dead to my family, and though I could look them up and see their pictures on the Fellowship of the Sun website, see them celebrating Christmas together, I would never again be able to interact with them.

No cards, no calls. No hugs, no dinners. No one calling to check in on me or even give me a stern talking to out of what they said was love.

We were already estranged this past year, but now it was like I didn’t exist anymore.

I was forever dead to them.

And they went on, looking as happy as ever. My grandparents had even come down that Christmas, something they hadn’t done in years.

While Terrance went with the matriarch's great grandsons to the winters games in central America...I had a complete breakdown. I laid on the living room floor with our cat for days. I slept. I stared. I just…

Laid on the living room floor with our cat.

Terrance came home a day early because he couldn’t reach me and saw that I hadn’t moved, and then a counselor came over to assess me.

There was an extensive system in place for taking care of novus that were having mental and emotional health issues, dozens of treatment plans to help them balance again, but with sapiens, if you didn’t have a legitimate chemical or genetic reason for your issues, they pretty much just gave you some sedatives and kept an eye on you.

And suggested you get a mate.

But I had a mate.

And I was already tired.

So I lost an entire two months and probably twenty pounds.

Terrance was going through that strange last growing period at that time, and even though he was dead tired he still dragged himself out of bed to take care of me, go to work as a peacekeeper doing clerical work and them come back home to take care of me. He passed out one day in the shower and after that…

I worked on pulling myself together.

We were both kind of dead on our feet for a few weeks, spending minimal time away from home, leaving just to work – Terrance as a peacekeeper while I worked as a dishwasher to give myself something to do during the night so I didn’t just curl up and die. Besides work and a little shopping, we just laid together in bed, holding each other, the cat somewhere in there as well, usually on the bed with us or spread out in the same spot in the living room where I had spent a couple days with her.

We didn’t really have any deep conversations. In fact, we didn’t talk much at all that entire first year as The Abbotts. We’d talk, sure, but it was the basics.

What do you want to eat?

Where are you going?

When will you be home?

Where are you?

Are you feeling okay?

What can I do to help?

We’d make small talk, but mostly...we just sat in silence together.

We enjoyed the silence. It was comfortable. Usually I’d hold Terrance while he laid across me, in bed he’d hold me. The television would be on, or we’d have the curtains open to look out at the view from our apartment, but usually we just laid together, resting, focusing on each other.

It was kind of weird, but once Terrance was out of his final growth period, things were easier. I felt bad admitting it, but when he was bigger and stronger, I felt...more comfortable not being so in control. Felt like…I didn’t have to be the bad guy. It felt like I just...was less responsible for things because I could always blame him.

I know that was stupid, but it was how I felt, and it just…

It made things less stressful.

It was just an excuse to avoid responsibility for where my life was.

And my life wasn’t bad, but it felt like it was wrong.

And it took years to not feel that way.

It wasn’t until I started going back to church about five years after Terrance and I settled in West Campora that I started to feel like I wasn’t some sinner waiting for God to smite me and start an eternity of damnation. I didn’t feel like I was in the wrong.

Except that I wasn’t married, and I was living in sin because we didn’t vow to God our intent to be together forever.

But that was an easy fix for us.

We got married on Christmas so we’d have something else to celebrate, since we were a family of two (plus two cats, because the random cat needed a friend when we were at work). It was small, and it took place at our church with our friends – it was a nondenominational church, since the one I grew up in felt very wrong now, and the one Terrance was raised in was taking a strange militant turn that made us (me much more so than Terrance) uncomfortable.

And we had made friends.

Terrance was mentoring the matriarch’s grandsons with their athletics, so we had made connections through them. We saw a couple of them at church, especially after I started helping out and volunteering between classes at school after Terrance had forced me to sign up. When I graduated from Greater Lakes U with masters in Religious study and a minor in childhood education, I devoted all my spare time to the church.

Terrance pushed me to pursue my passion with helping novus children that were suffering from blindness, since he knew that was something I had always been interested in, and so I went back to school to further my degree in education, and that was when I met one very special young woman that drove everyone nuts.

But she was the matriarch’s heir, and so everyone pretty much left her alone, even if it became clear quickly that most everyone had a very special distaste for Miss Lovina, who everyone in the city sarcastically called Lovey Dovey. She had been made to take the course as part of her wider education that her grandmother – the current matriarch – told her she had to take so she ‘understood the needs of her people’, even though Lovina had a doctorate in government and world relations as well as novus societal studies.

I personally got along just fine with her, and was very happy when she showed up to all my sermons at the church, where I was elevated to the youngest elder there as I was specifically put int charge of organizing events for the blind, the children of the city specifically. It felt really nice, being part of a church again, and I was excited at the prospect of teaching bible study to the little kids, something Terrance would come and help with to give a novus prospective.

Lovina always sat front and center for every one of the sermons I gave, however few they were, and volunteered to help with every church activity. She helped me when we were organizing project and programs for the children and was always on hand to assist….

And then she propositioned me, aggressively, far more aggressive then Terrance ever had, and then it became a problem fast. The only reason I got away without an actual rape occurring was because I had been holding a toddler when it happened and the toddler had screamed right into her ear, hurting her enough to let me go so I could go to where Terrance had been helping move tables around upstairs.

Terrance called her grandmother and one night Lovina’s was there, and the next she was gone, firmly stuck in the matriarch district and forced to stay there by the peacekeepers. I was told to stay in the education district where I was working and now living with Terrance, but I saw her again a few months later when she appeared at the novus elementary school for the blind I was working at.

Terrance was out of state for a meet with Lovina’s cousins, but he had made sure I had someone nearby to protect me – Lovina had easily scalped them, and then she dragged me out of my classroom, my entire class of toddlers freaking out and screaming for help.

One of the toddlers came after me and his ear piercing screaming had drawn the attention of the other teachers, and then things got…

Ugly.