She sat across the bar from us, kiddie-corner, and her nickname among her friends was Baby Spice. I noticed her the way you notice someone when you have no intention of doing anything about it, which is to say completely and immediately and with great effort to appear otherwise.

Her name was Kim. That went on for months — summer into autumn, 1998. Just watching. Telling myself it was nothing.

November 8th, 1998. We'd been drinking, playing cards, the kind of evening that goes longer than expected because nobody wants to be the one to leave. Her roommate Robbie was shuffling the deck. He announced that if he pulled a particular card, Kim and I had to kiss. He pulled it. We laughed. I told Kim she didn't have to. She said okay. He shuffled again. Pulled again. The right card. I found out later he'd been pulling from the bottom of the deck the whole time. He'd engineered the entire thing. We were too drunk to notice and too comfortable with each other for it to feel like a trick.

We kissed. The same rush I'd felt in Laura's basement moved through me — different in texture, the same in nature. After that we were inseparable. By April of 1999 — five months after the card trick — Kim and I were moving in together. I want to be honest about what I was doing when I moved in with Kim, because the honest version isn't particularly flattering. I was trying to make her love me the way I needed to be loved. That's the core of it. By moving in quickly, by making myself indispensable, by taking on every domestic responsibility she didn't want to deal with — maybe if I was useful enough, present enough, committed enough, she'd give me the thing I'd been looking for since I was a boy standing in a flowerbed waiting for his father to say happy birthday.

My friends told me not to go after her. Several of them, directly. They'd seen something I didn't want to see, or couldn't. I was smarter than them, I told myself. There was also a red flag I'd seen and filed. When Kim's temper came out — not at me, usually, but at situations, at other people, at the friction of daily life — something in my chest tightened in a way I recognised. The same tightening from standing outside a room in a house in Regina, reading the energy before going in. I told myself it was nothing. I told myself I could handle it. I told myself I could change it.

They say you marry your mother. Boy, did I.

What I didn't understand — what took me years to understand — is that you can't earn your way to being loved. You can do every chore and carry every responsibility and show up perfectly and it won't fill the specific gap you're trying to fill, because that gap isn't about usefulness. It's about something else entirely. And the harder you try to fill it with usefulness the more invisible the real need becomes.

In August 2000, My first son was born. I remember standing there and looking at him and feeling something I hadn't expected. Not just love — though that, immediately and completely. Something more specific. The feeling of being important. Of mattering in a way that was unconditional and didn't have to be earned. For the first time in my life I felt genuinely, unambiguously important to another person. He was a few hours old and he'd already given me something I'd been looking for since I was four years old in a flowerbed in Saskatoon. I had no idea yet how much I'd put on him because of that.

I enrolled in film school in September 2001. My second son arrived the next January. The math of those years is staggering to look at now — full-time student, part-time worker, father to two young children, then three, then four. Our third son came in July 2007. A daughter in August 2010.

I graduated in 2006 and opened a production company with a friend from school. We had absolutely no idea what we were doing. I wasn't a good businessman. I gave discounts I couldn't afford to give just to land work. I cared more about the quality of what we made than whether we were making enough off it to sustain the company. There were things in those years I was genuinely proud of — real work, work that mattered. But we closed the business in 2012 when we moved to West Kelowna. By then we had about $130,000 to $150,000 in debt, most of it owed to Kim's father. He never made me feel as bad about it as I felt on my own.

When I closed the door on the business for the last time, I didn't know who I was anymore. I'd spent eleven years building an identity around something that was now finished, and I had no idea what came next.

My counsellor asked me once what I thought I'd been looking for in my relationship with Kim. The honest answer took a while to form because it required admitting something I'd been circling for months without landing on directly. I'd been trying to get from Kim what Bonnie never gave me. That's the core of it. The unconditional, you-are-enough love that a mother is supposed to provide and didn't. I put years of that unmet need onto one woman without telling her that was what I was doing. Without even knowing that was what I was doing.

No relationship survives that weight. Not because Kim was incapable of love — she wasn't. But because no person can love another person enough to fill a hole that size. The hole doesn't close from the outside. I know that now. I didn't know it for sixteen years. I wasn't trying to hurt her. I was trying to be saved. Those two things aren't always distinguishable from the outside.

I loved Kim. Whatever else is true about those years, the love was real. It just wasn't enough — not enough of the right kind, not expressed in the right ways, not capable of bridging the specific distances between two people who were both carrying things they couldn't fully put down.

There was also the weight of my body changing in ways I didn't understand. In 2007 I was around 170 pounds. By our wedding in 2008 I was 190. By my daughters birth in 2010 I was 250. By the time we moved to West Kelowna in 2012 I was 278 pounds. I didn't know why. I ate poorly and didn't exercise, yes — but there was something else, something I couldn't account for yet.

Three months after we moved to West Kelowna, Kim told me it was over.

From the fall of 2012 until January 2015, I slept on the couch in the basement. We told the kids it was because I snored. I'd never felt so alone. That sounds dramatic but it's the precise truth. Being surrounded by people you love and being unreachable to them — or being unable to reach them — is a specific kind of loneliness that has no good solution. You're there and you're not there at the same time. Present in the house, absent from the life.

Kevin called from Calgary, working in the oil fields. He asked if I'd want to come and work with him for a while. I told Kim about it. Said maybe it would give us some space, some perspective on what we were. She didn't hesitate. Not for a second.

I'd needed her to hesitate.

I left on January 14th, 2015. I had a huge rush of energy driving out of West Kelowna. It lasted until I got past Kelowna. Past Vernon. Somewhere around Sicamous the adrenaline ran out and what was underneath it was grief, and from Sicamous to Revelstoke I cried almost the whole way. Not for the marriage exactly. For the kids. For what they were going to lose, what they'd already been losing, what I was driving away from.

Calgary in January 2015. Kevin's basement. The particular relief of being somewhere that wasn't where everything had gone wrong, mixed with the particular shame of being the person who had left. Kevin got me a job doing well testing. The work itself was manageable. What was hard was everything around it — up at four-thirty in the morning, twelve hours of work, an hour back to the hotel, eat something, sleep, repeat. Sometimes for a month straight.

The isolation was the worst part. Not the cold, not the hours. The isolation. You did the job, you drove back to the hotel, and then you were alone with whatever you'd brought with you. For me that meant the loop — the same thoughts turning over and over in the dark, the same inventory of failures and regrets, the same conclusion that kept presenting itself no matter how many times I tried to argue against it.

I tried the things people suggest. Think positively. Get out of your head. Be grateful. I'd feel better for a week or two and then I'd slide back. I didn't understand why I couldn't just stay better. I assumed it was a character flaw. More evidence for the file. I know now it wasn't a character flaw. It was a nervous system that had been running on high alert since I was nine years old, in a body that had spent decades absorbing things without processing them, trying to regulate itself with no tools for the job. But I didn't have that language then. I just had the loop.

The divorce was finalised in April 2016. Kim's father cut me off completely. No acknowledgement, no conversation, just silence. But I got one conversation with her mother, at one of my second oldests soccer games in 2017. We held each other. I don't know that either of us said much that mattered in words. What mattered was the hug itself — the way she held on, the way I held on back, both of us communicating without language what we hadn't been able to say through everything that had happened. She passed away later that year. I'm grateful for that conversation. I'm grateful she knew.

In July 2017, I moved back to the Okanagan, closer to the kids. Same basement suite, still there nine years later.

I got a job with a Telecom company as a field technician in 2016. Good pay, decent work, the kind that gets you out of your head because it requires your hands and your attention. In those early years it was manageable. What came later was different. By 2022 and into 2023 we'd been in contract negotiations for well over a year, the pressure building steadily, a strike becoming less theoretical by the week.

There was one moment I've thought about since. A customer — a woman around my age. We'd talked during the job, the way you sometimes talk with customers when the work takes a while and the conversation finds its own level. Kids. Divorce. Dating. There was an ease to it I hadn't felt with someone new in a long time.

When I was finishing up she said something kind. A genuine compliment, honest, warmly meant. And in that moment I felt something I recognised but couldn't quite act on. She'd opened a door, maybe. I'll never know. What I did was laugh it off. Deflect. The door closed.

I drove away from that job and felt like a complete idiot. Not because anything terrible had happened. That was the point. A woman who seemed to see me clearly had said something that could have been the beginning of something, and I'd reflexively shut it down because I didn't know how to receive it. Because the wall I'd built to keep people from getting close enough to hurt me was working exactly as designed, and the design was destroying me.

That went into the weight too.

The strike was coming. My job was going to stop. I had no money saved. I had no social life. I had a lifetime of unprocessed everything pressing against walls that were getting thinner.

That was the week before March 4th, 2023.

You already know what happened that night. That's where this book began.

But now you know what it took to get there.