Into 2026 – Gaze to the Heavens – SPECIAL EXPANDED EDITION WITH MORE ILLUSTRATIONS AND PHOTOGRAPHY – BETWEEN THE TRACKS – $19.99

“When love is lost, do not bow your head in sadness; instead, keep your head up high and gaze into heaven, for that is where your broken heart has been sent to heal.” – M. E. Adebayo

Conner Matthews sits at his worn writing desk and squints at the calendar in his mind—December 31, 1980, transitioning into 1981, when thirty-year-old Conner learned life’s hardest lesson in one sharp, midnight epiphany.

He was alone in the sparsely furnished basement apartment at Maplehurst Court in Knoxville, the December-cold air thick with dread as he turned over the envelope on his lap—no one, surely, would want it back, although there was a return address.

He could hear University of Tennessee students outside, setting off fireworks as if they believed a new year automatically delivered fresh starts. And he was about to realize a fresh start was upon him, whether he wanted it or not.

As a self-styled “Christmas Treat” (or cheap therapy), Conner had spent his last paycheck on a stereo component system: two floor speakers, an equalizer that glowed with promise, a CD player, an AM/FM radio, a cassette deck, and the crown jewel—a turntable.

His original setup had gone with his ex-wife, along with the extensive vinyl collection he’d been hoarding since college. Now he owned only a handful of records he deemed essential.

The needle dropped onto Kenny Rogers’ “Lady,” and Rogers’s warm tenor filled the steam-heated air. Conner collapsed into a sagging leather armchair he’d rescued from Goodwill—its springs groaning under his weight—and stared at the return address with the hollow resignation of a man watching the last ferry depart from a winter harbor.

Two days earlier—Monday, December 29—he had slit the envelope open with a butter knife. Inside lay a single sheet of paper, her handwriting looping and precise:

“Dear Conner, I don’t know where to begin.”

He read those opening words and knew he was in trouble. The phrase clung to the page like a confession at a police station; nothing good ever followed. Connor braced himself as his eyes tracked the next line, but what came next was a plea for understanding, a careful apology for the mistakes, and an admission that sometimes people made choices that later they would regret.

She wrote that she didn’t want to hurt him, but she needed to be honest. She was sure he’d understand, eventually. “You always understood me better than I understood myself, Conner,” she’d written, which sounded magnanimous until he realized it was an exit line, a compliment designed to soften the landing.

He kept reading, desperate for a twist—maybe a P.S. that said “just kidding,” perhaps a coda where she realized all roads led back to him. But the letter was an eleven-sentence eulogy, and at the end she signed her name with the same looping flourish he’d once found charming and now found savage.

The impact was silent but seismic—his future, constructed from what he’d believed were mutual promises and a love so deep it couldn’t be anything but real, disintegrated like a sandcastle at high tide.

Depression arrived without warning or courtesy. It came to him as a creature he’d only known through others’ stories: a massive, shadowy black hound that first settled heavily against his door, its rhythmic panting audible through the wood. Then suddenly it was inside with him, its weight pressing against his chest, its rough paws scoring marks across every vulnerable place he possessed.

When John Lennon’s song, “Starting Over,” spun up next, Conner listened to Lennon croon about rebuilding from the ashes, but every lyric felt like salt rubbed into an open wound. The record spun, and so did his thoughts: How do you reconstruct a life when the foundation has vanished?

He poured himself a water glass two-thirds full of Scotch and cradled it in his hands, letting the fiery vapors sting his nostrils before daring to raise it to his lips.

Conner sat in the half-dark, with only the sodium glow of the parking lot bleeding through the slats of the blinds, and watched frost rim the inside of the window.

He had the sensation of being hermetically sealed, like a bug in a specimen jar, the cold pressing in from all sides but unable to quite smother the heat burning in his chest.

His mind circled the letter—its precise, looping script, the even pressure of her lines, the complete absence of inkblots or cross-outs. It was as if she’d known exactly what she wanted to say, as if she’d rehearsed it a dozen times, until the words fit together with the lockstep efficiency of a firing squad.

The cheap King George Scotch bit down hard, but he relished the pain. It clarified. He imagined her in the act of writing: sitting at her kitchen table in her husband’s ancestral log home, maybe in the soft white robe he had given her one Christmas, perhaps with a cup of hot tea, maybe with her hair pulled back the way she did when she meant business, setting the pen to the page with calm, deliberate movements.

She was always so resolute and gracious. The letter felt like a riddle. He kept reading it, searching for a hidden code—a phrase, a slip of the pen, something that betrayed doubt or hesitation or the slightest hesitation of hand. There was nothing.

Outside, a battered Ford Fiesta skidded into the parking lot, music blaring from half-open windows, its driver and passenger both fumbling for cigarettes as they staggered up the steps into the building. They looked fifteen.

The sight made me want to laugh and cry at the same time, a feeling that instantly curdled into bitter self-pity. He took another sip, then another, until the glass was empty and the room tilted gently, as if the foundations of the world were no more secure than his own. His thoughts started to blur around the edges, memories overlapping with sensation until he was no longer sure which decade he occupied.

Because, really, he’d seen this kind of letter before. he’d seen what it did to men. Conner saw it arrive in the field, in the jungle, delivered by a trembling hand or in the cold, dry air of mail call. Those letters always began the same way: “Dear John.”

The words themselves became a contagion, the seeds of a sickness that ate away at resolve, at hope, at the bone-deep sense that someone would be waiting on the other side of the ocean.

He’d seen how it hollowed out the strongest of men. He’d seen the aftermath: the reckless volunteering, the calculated acts of self-destruction, the sense that there was nothing left to lose.

In the early morning haze, those two words haunted him: “Dear Conner.” They transported him back to Vietnam, to his friend Lee’s hollow eyes after mail call.

The letter had arrived in a pale blue envelope that Lee folded into his pocket without a word. Within days, Lee volunteered for point, moved with careless steps through territory they all knew was mined.

When the explosion came, Conner never could decide whether Lee had stopped caring or had made a choice. Those gentle opening words—they created a fog that swallowed men whole.

He once read about it years ago—how those letters could extinguish faithful romances faster than any artillery barrage. He pictured that private’s shoulders sagging beneath his pack, the letter drifting to wet earth as he stared numbly at a gray sky.

Conner never knew which hurt more: writing a “Dear John” or reading one. By the time he fingered her looping script, the end had been scripted in glances and silences over months. Like a hopeless romantic, he’d believed he could turn back the tide with a grand gesture or a lucky song, maybe, even a plea.

In the decades since, friends—men and women—have come to him with trembling voices, clutching their own letters, their own shards of hope.

They’ve sat together on park benches under rust-streaked lampposts, steam wafting from chipped coffee cups, and Conner has listened.

Each time someone confesses, “I just don’t know what to do,” his throat constricts.

They don’t know how much he understands the hollow ache, the late-night carousel of memories, the urgent need to face that “black dog” before it swallows you whole.

He tells them what he learned: confront the darkness head-on. Otherwise, it sneaks into every new beginning and turns every bright possibility into a nightmare.

Now, as he sets down his pen, Conner’s lips twist into something between a smile and a grimace.

Life’s unpredictable route—its sharp turns and sudden drops—strikes him as almost comical in retrospect.

In quiet moments, he pictures her in a sunlit kitchen, finally at ease in her own skin. He imagines his father having found whatever absolution he sought. He sees his war buddies sleeping through the night without ghosts at their bedsides.

That depression—that massive black hound that once pinned him to the floor—he visualizes it aged and docile now, dozing in patches of light that warm its arthritic joints.

As another year approaches, he raises his glass to whoever might be listening: “To vinyl records that still spin true, to second chances that actually work, to lives well-lived despite everything. And to the new year—may it bring us all the courage to face our black dogs in daylight, where they cast shorter shadows.”

Read inspiring stories of faith, resilience, and love in Darryl Armstrong’s newest collection of short stories – BETWEEN THE TRACKS.

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