I would never have left my marriage. So I was ejected from it. Thrown from a speeding vehicle, my body tumbling down the ravine.

When you won't choose transformation for yourself, it chooses you.

The losses had been stacking for years before Tyler left. My uncle first, my only real ally, gone before I had the chance to say what I needed to say. Bill next, my familiar, my first experience of love without condition. His death brought blisters, hair loss, twitching eyes, extreme depression and weight loss. I went on medication and started therapy. Something that never would have happened without that fracture.

My mother's death arrived with new fears that had teeth. Genetic testing. BRCA markers at alarming levels. One surgery became five. A year and a half of pain and uncertainty, layered on top of grieving not just the loss of her, but the potential we would never realize. If she lived another fifty years we never would have gotten to a place we both needed to be. I would always be waiting for her.

My father's diagnosis came next. Tyler shortly after. Both unraveling simultaneously, as if the universe had decided subtlety was no longer necessary.

I am in two transits simultaneously, and between them they have dismantled everything.

Saturn square Saturn: my own foundations being challenged, restructured, reorganized at the root. Everything I built to survive is being examined for whether it was ever really mine. This runs through February 2027.

Neptune square Midheaven: my career identity dissolving and reforming in fog so thick I cannot see my hands. The direction is unclear. The fog is the process. This runs through December 2027.

Saturn demands I build something solid. Neptune makes it hard to see what that is. I am constructing a foundation in the dark, fortified with the self-knowledge I have gained from my own Map. There was a time I could not do any of this. Now, in the most chaotic central collapse of my life, I feel strangely unafraid. Prepared even if I'm not ready.

I have been studying tarot, astrology, behavior. Befriending crows. Building The Map, four points of orientation I assembled from my own deaths. Astrology: who you are built to be. Tarot: where you are right now. Somatic therapy and brain modalities: what your nervous system is holding that your mind can't reach. Grip: the pattern you run when you're afraid. Answers aren't the point. Orientation is. Only you can walk the path.

The path doesn't have to be walked alone.

This is the Murder. A coven. A community of people who know they must die to become who they actually are. Who will not resist the drop but dive into it. Who understand that avoiding death is impossible, but that embracing it can make all manner of things possible.

This publication is the companion to the Map.

A murder flies together.