North Island...

Motherfucker Burn shows up here and sits me down and says something like sorry buddy, this one isn't going to go down like the last one did. I said something like I know, different part of the world - we've come too far, are different men than the men we were stomping around the world in our former lives. He said then that I didn't understand and suggested I listened close. He told me he wasn't writing the second book, that he couldn't, that it wasn't about him anymore. Then he told me the second book had to be written, said something about a process of elimination but by then I was already walking away from him. I don't like surprises and I don't like being abandoned and he was giving me both and nothing else. Nothing else. He said we each have a job while we're here. His is to train for the Ironman and mine is to write the book, the whole fucking book, on my own. I haven't been hanging out with him much because I feel like I've been betrayed - no, not betrayed - I just feel so fucking responsible for this now and that's not a corner I want to find myself in.

I took a couple days, alone, before agreeing to meet up with him again. We had a couple drinks, dinner. He told me at the beginning that I could not walk out on him, but that he was standing firm, that he would be a chaperone, at best until I didn't need him anymore, but that things weren't going to change. I've been through a lot, he said, and I'm going to go through a lot soon, he said, and then he said that he wasn't doing this for any other reason but for the sake that it's what is best for me, absolutely best for me. That's when a crazy thing happened. I believed him, no...I understood him and accepted him. And now I'm here staying in a house on North Island and he's off somewhere else while I get my head wrapped around this. I don't know what I expected this second edition to be like, but I didn't think it would be like this, even after the promises we've made.

I need to understand what is happening here. I need to understand. Something happened. Something terrible happened and I am detached from something, right now just floating.