loss is loss, even of fictional characters

It isn't like Peter Quill and Gamora and Dax and Groot have been in my life all that long.
I have only known them since 2014, of course.
Length of time does not a relationship make.
They were part of my life and I was very much looking forward to having more time to enjoy their company and their adventures...
but now they have been killed off in this latest Marvel movie...
and I am bereft.
Totally and completely bereft.
Mostly it was the way in which they died.
Well, all except Gamora. She died kicking and screaming for life to the very last second as she was hurled off a cliff into an abyss.
The others were there one moment...
then blown away as dust in the next.
Literally.
Crumbling as they spoke, crumbling as they stood, crumbling...
then scattered by the breeze in this direction and that...
nothing to show that they ever existed.
All I could think of was the events of September 11, 2001.
One moment, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were erect and shining in the sun, full of life, full of promise.
Then they were collapsing to the ground a hundred stories below.
The people inside were vanished, their bodies smashed to dust by the weight of tons and tons and tons of concrete and steel and glass.
I remember that people were not allowed to clean their nearby apartments of the dust blown in when the windows imploded. They had to wait for that dust to be gathered and analyzed for the DNA of the vanished people, to confirm their deaths.
Honestly, I would have to move.
I don't know that I would be able to live in an apartment which might still have those minute remnants of other human beings.

And now, my Guardians of the Galaxy are all reduced to dust.
All except poor Rocket.
He was as forlorn as I was, perhaps more so.
He had known the joy of being part of a family for the past few years...
and now he was the sole survivor.
Bereft.

This will not be a movie I see again.