Dear Fear,

I did not realize you lived inside me until now.

I knew something was stuck, but I didn’t know until now that it was fear.

Fear of getting over my ex-wife.

Let me paint a picture for you.

We met twenty-two years ago. I was eighteen. She was fifteen.

She was too young for me, so I must have filed her away in my mind until…

We started dating eighteen years ago.

I fell in love with her not long after.

I followed her across the country two years later, confident we would get married.

We tied the knot three years later.

Our love for each other burned with the fire of a thousand suns. She gave me the world.

Yet we treated each other in poor regard.

We both had deep-seated insecurities that drove a permanent wedge between us.

Eight years after we got married, we separated. I left her and never turned back.

Until now.

We have been apart for five years.

Divorced for three years.

I woke up from a vivid dream about her just now.

In that dream, she proposed marriage to me, as she did in 2011.

Before I said yes, I told her we would get divorced later.

Did she want to enter the marriage, I asked.

I was from the future, hoping to re-weave the fabric of time.

She was also confident we could change our ways.

Get along for a change.

Give each other space when we need it.

Fight for our marriage.

In that dream, she fought the monsters while I was asleep in our bed.

She didn’t want to wake Dream-Me.

The monsters were manifestations of you.

I felt so disappointed when I woke up at 2:09 AM in 2025, my current reality.

I thought I wanted to move on, but five years after I walked away, I want her with more intensity.

I want to be close to her.

I want the life we wanted to build together that the monsters fought to keep from our reality.

I want to fight those monsters as my ex-wife did in my dream.

I want to have kids with her, me at the ripe age of forty.

I don’t want to move on.

At least not yet.

I fear that getting over her may be inevitable.

In fact, I may be close to turning that corner.

But now I want to move backward in time.

I want to repair whatever tore us apart.

Or do I have to step forward instead…

…and reside among the living again?

Either way, you won’t win.

I will get my life back.

You will lie dormant forever.

I will thrive, with or without her.

(86% Style Score)