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sword and bow, gun and gears and engines, every marvelous creation made by man to compensate for a body barely competent to carry its brain in its head.
    I give up myself in mind, abandoning the fluid switch between machine and gray matter that extends myself into others, to disconnect my thoughts to them and theirs to me, to sever the connections that have sustained me. To shut myself off in my own head. To live alone with my thoughts, their echoes muffled in close quarters.
    I give myself up in identity as a soldier and an officer and a killer, as a friend and a colleague, and as one by whose hand humanity keeps its place in the universe.
    Make no mistake that I am weaker for the loss of each. Make no mistake that I will have to learn again how to fit myself into a world that no longer works like it should. Make no mistake that it will be through force of will alone, that my frustration and anger at being less than what I was will not be visited on you—that even in my newly weakened state I am still dangerous and liable to rage at what I have taken from myself, by becoming this new self.
    The woman who opens her eyes in the body I see before me cannot be the same as the one who closes her eyes in the body I have now. Too much changed to remain intact, too much left behind that can’t be brought over. I will hold my image of myself to me, but there is only so much of me that will fit.
    * * *

    If you knew all of this I know you would ask me to consider what I was doing, whether I was sure I was making the right decision, and that you would rather face a life without me than to have me choose a life I would not choose for myself. I know this is what you would say and do as well as I know myself.
    And this is why I say with all affection that sometimes you can be such a stupid man. I wouldn’t mind you feeling just a little bit greedy for me, that the idea of not having me would make you angry, not heavy-hearted and accepting. There are things you still have to learn about me and this is one of them. It is not that you are too considerate but that I don’t mind when you tell me what you want and put that first instead of last.
    I don’t mind because that is what I am doing now. You should not think I do any of this for you, that I am committing a selfless act or an expression of slavish devotion, that I have signed on for a mermaid’s sacrifice and will walk on knives for dumb love. I am too selfish for that. I want you to know that I am here not for you but for me. I want you for my own. I want the life we will have together for my own. I want the silence of peace and release from being the one who walks ten steps ahead of Death. I want the honor of not being feared or hated, and of not having those be the correct response to my presence.
    I want to be able to say that I have done my part and I have done it well, but that my part is over and now it is time for my reward, and that reward is you and this life. I want all of this and I am willing to pay to get it.
    But it is still hard.
    In this I imagine that I am now your equal: You once gave up a life, leaving behind a world and everything on it, all that you had been and everything you knew, on that single sphere of rock and air and water. You put it behind you and stepped into a new life in which you found me. I can’t imagine that it was easy to do this.
    But was it a sacrifice? Did it take from you more than you could bear? It takes nothing from what you did to say it was not, that you left a life that had nothing left for you except the marking of time. Hard though it may be, it is not a sacrifice to give up that for which you no longer have a use.
    I am at that place now. This life has made me who I am and who I am no longer wants this life. I have seen so much of this universe behind a rifle and a mission. I am ready to see a smaller part of it in depth and in peace. It is not a sacrifice to pay for what you want though the price is high. The price for this new