Hate me

by JapaneseMiko

Where do you turn when the only person you ever loved is better off without you? What can you do when the past refuses to lay down and die? Well, what can you do?

I have to block out thoughts of you so I don't lose my head

They crawl in like a cockroach leaving babies in my bed

Dropping little reels of tape to remind me that I'm alone

Playing movies in my head that make a porno feel like home

I arch my back and lean into his touch, his gentle caresses telling the story of his passion. Smooth and calm, just like he is. A little rash at times, but steady and constant for the most part. Just the right mix of experience and innocence lay beneath his touches. They are like heaven for me. I can't hold back my moans, deep and throaty, just the way he likes.

His hands are like fire, running all over my body, shooting fierce bolts of passion deep in my bones. It's not an overwhelming feeling, I don't find myself losing control, but it's just enough, just enough to bring me to the brink of something so pure and wonderful that I cry out in surprise when he runs a solitary hand over my ass. Oh gods, he knows just where to press to get the best reaction from me.

I look up into his blue eyes, their normally clear depths transformed with lust, and love. Oh! To be able to look into those eyes forever! But even as I think this, they are changing, warping into something so strange, and yet so familiar. The soft sky blue transforms into deep jade, glowing brightly even in the dark of the night. The pale features elongate and become graceful, less innocent and more time worn, yet still elegant enough to send a trill of excitement down my spine. His bangs run together and change color to form two silver daggers on either side of his face.

And now I am being yanked away, out of my physical body, being banned to the peanut gallery. A spectator in the farce that has just begun. I knew it was going to happen, but that doesn't make it hurt any less.

I watch on in horror, and slight arousement, as Sephiroth takes his place and he takes mine. I watch on as Sephiroth does all the things he did to me, the wandering hands, the sweet words. He moans and he groans and he throws his head back in pleasure, a pleasure I can never dream of giving him. His blonde hair falls limply onto his sweat-streaked face as one well-timed tug brings him to the brink and his seed flows all over the place like streams of molten lava, only white and utterly delicious. At least, I would think that his cum would be just as sweet tasting as he is. I wouldn't technically know.

Sephiroth leans down and his long hair covers their faces like a silvery curtain. I can't see what's happening, but I can guess. The overlying tenderness in his caresses are burning holes in my heart. Why couldn't I have been that caring?

I can't move. I can't cry out in resistance. I watch on as the charade continues. Sephiroth is reaching for something, something lost in the tangle of the sheets. He grins triumphantly as he pulls it out, the liquid inside the clear bottle sloshing around the same way my stomach is, a sickening sound that brings the bile to the back of my throat.

The bonds tighten until my throat has constricted well beyond the ability to breath, but I don't need to breathe here. I don't need to do anything but watch in sickening mortification as Sephiroth slowly slips his long fingers inside my love. Silent tears stream down my face as I watch my love's cock twitch as it begins to rise again, as he cries out in pleasure at the welcome intrusion. The horrifying, sinful intrusion that should have never taken place, which is still taking place as another finger is added.

Oh god's I want to look away! I want to ignore this desire, this despicable heat that is rising in my belly at each moan. I want it to all go away, but I look on. I can't help it; I think that I am now doing it out of my own free will. There is no other option. One slick thrust later and I have lost all hold on my body. It is now careening with each thrust, each rise of my love's hips as he welcomes the internal friction he is now feeling. I am being unwilling brought along with them, trapped in their sinful dance as I am brought to the edge again and again before my love and his fucking lover finally climax, their heads flying back, eyes blessedly closed now-the glow dissipating at last.

I lay limply in the dark prison of my own mind as the words I have heard whispered over and over again in my every waking moment come back to haunt me. Words that should have been said to me! Words that I should have made my own!

"I love you, Seph."

There's a burning in my pride, a nervous bleeding in my brain

An ounce of peace is all I want for you. Will you never call again?

And will you never say that you love me just to put it in my face?

And will you never try to reach me? It is I that wanted space

I sit up sharply in the bed, the sweat and juices sticking to ever surface, every crease in the sheets. I can't escape what I have seen, what I have experienced. I know it's wrong, but I just can't make myself stop. I haven't seen him for so long, and the memories still assault me. I thought that moving away would make them go. I thought that going to a place where I would never have to lay eyes on him again would force my mind to let him go.

The dreams only got worse. They are now more frequent, more vivid, and more sensual in a way that makes me want to scrub off all my impurities immediately.

I can't help feeling that I'm not angry at him. I'm really angry at myself. I was the one that was weak. I pushed him away. I wasn't good enough. I can't spend the rest of my life waiting by the fucking phone, staring at it in the darkness, willing it to light up and ring. Picking it up to find that it's his voice on the other end of the line, deep and full of sorrow, husky from crying. He'll want me back, and I don't think I can go to him now, not after everything that has happened.

What if I don't want him to take me back?

I'm an idiot, I know that now. Waiting and waiting for a call that will never come is pathetic, and nothing like the strong woman I used to be, but what if I don't want to be that woman anymore? What if I want to cry and scream and succumb to my broken heart? It's my choice, gods damn it!

It's my choice...

So why is it that I feel so rotten inside?

Maybe he did have every right to be happy. Maybe I wasn't fulfilling my role when it came to thinking of his pleasure, but that didn't mean he could run off and start fucking the first thing with two legs and a dick that he could find. And to make it worse, it had to be Sephiroth! The prettiest man I've ever seen. He puts all us women to shame! Even though I was the one that pushed him away... I can't help but become jealous when I think about Sephiroth's creamy white skin and starling green eyes, his thin figure and lean muscles... How can anyone compete with that?

Maybe I'm just overreacting. It was my fault that he left, perhaps I'm only angry because of who he ran to in the end. I'm a woman, I have pride. Seeing the man I fell in love with run into the arms of a gorgeous male hurt more than I'm willing to admit.

I peel the sheets away from my sticky body and wrinkle my nose in disgust. It would be all right I suppose... If I could just kick these disgusting dreams. I've never shown much of an interest in homosexuals, but I was never really on their side either. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and rest some of my weight on them. It terrifies me to think that just the sight of two men, one of who I claim to love, having sex would produce such a reaction. It's been ten minutes since I woke up and I'm still a little weak-kneed.

Gods only know how much I hate this. This knowing what I did to him and knowing that I left him there, lost and confused, while I went away just to hide my bruised pride. I don't think I can take much more of this. I know somewhere deep in my heart that he still loves me, at least a little bit, and that tiny part is eating me up inside. It grows, then settles, and then grows again when I least expect it. It gorges itself on all the little things, the small doubts I have from time to time, and takes its strength from my many weaknesses until I can't stop it any longer.

Then the dreams begin.

I shuffle my way over to my bathroom, wincing as the chill rises up into my feet from the white tiles. I hop quickly over to the small mat by the tub's edge and pause. I know what I am trying to do here. Water is good, it purifies me. I can sit there under the spray for hours, not thinking, just feeling the water as it trickles down my body. I won't even mind when it inevitably turns cold.

I reach out and turn the tap, pulling up the plunger on the faucet to signal the coming of the overhead spray. My hand flies back as glacial water hits it. In moments, however, steam is billowing out from behind the curtain and fogging up my rather large mirror.

I sigh as I pull my shirt over my head and release the clasp of my bra, my generous cleavage spilling out for some well-deserved freedom. I arch my back and wince when I hear the resounding pop. I'm going to have some serious back problems some day.

The sleep pants are the next to go followed by my soaked underwear. I admire my body in the rapidly fogging mirror before stepping into the welcoming shower. I'm still pretty; I've still got the generous curves that have attracted men like flies to me ever since middle school. My long, chestnut hair glimmers through the steam, bouncing lightly with each motion of my head. I've been taking care of myself for the past few months, whether I thought about it or not. My skin's lost the sallow look it once held and is now tight and tan. Muscles stand out on my arms when I flex them. I've never looked better.

Sad, isn't it, that I had to crush two hearts to finally become the healthy, beautiful woman everyone has expected me to be. I can live without my heart.

Can he?

Hate me today

Hate me tomorrow

Hate me for all the things I didn't do for you

Hate me in ways

Yeah ways hard to swallow

Hate me so you can finally see what's good for you

Ever since I ran away from him that day, months ago now, I spent most of my days in a daze. I woke up, showered, and went to work just like everybody else, but my heart just wasn't in it, and my coworkers noticed. Whether or not I deserve friends is something I may never know, but I do know that they have been a huge help for me. I can only hope that he has a friend he can lean on as well.

Maybe I was wrong to break away from him and then react so badly when I'd found out he'd moved on. I could have set him back years in his emotional growth for all I know. He'd had problems in that area as it was. It was a part of the reason I had to leave him.

It had been horrible. I couldn't handle all his insecurities coupled with my own mental instabilities. I wanted to be free. I wanted to come home to a lover who wanted to hear about what I had done and why I had done it, not come home to a broken wreck of a man. I didn't want to hear him crying out in the middle of the night, his tears soaking the pillow to the point of complete saturation. I didn't want to deal with the nightmares, the haunted look his eyes would get from time to time, when he heard a certain song, a certain laugh, a certain movie.

His past reached out and encompassed all I was, all I never wanted to be. I was there for him when he reached out for me and, secretly, I hated him for it. He couldn't be there for me. He could barely be there for himself. Maybe Sephiroth could handle it better than I could, he never seemed to have a problem, often coming behind and picking up the pieces when I just couldn't bring myself to care enough.

So I did the only thing I could think of to do that would clear my life of the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

I made him hate me.

I'm sober now for 3 whole months it's one accomplishment that you helped me with

The one thing that always tore us apart is the one thing I won't touch again

In a sick way I want to thank you for holding my head up late at night

While I was busy waging wars on myself, you were trying to stop the fight

Inhaling the heavy steam from my shower, my mind began to spin backwards, back to my breaking point. The time in my life when I knew that things could not continue on the way they were going without one or both of us going insane.

He caught me one night, when I was drunk off my ass and just trying to survive the night, screw the morning. He caught me with a bottle of vodka in my hand singing a song of my own creation, crying and laugh and looking like the fool I was. I think that was when he began to change. I didn't see it until it was two years too late and I was already half-way across the country. He grew up that night, placed the past where it belonged, and devoted himself completely to me, though I was too caught up in my drunken pain to notice it.

"Why do you keep doing this to yourself?" His voice echoes across time and space to assault me once more. I can't seem to shake the look on his face, the look that said he understood my pain, that he pitied me and wanted nothing more than to make me happy. It was a look I had come to hate. "Have you even bothered to look in a mirror lately? You don't eat, you don't sleep, and you don't even bother to go to work some days. This is destroying your life!"

"So let it." I have repeated those words so many times in the course of my life. Each and every time I said them, I regretted it in so many different ways later down the road, but I never stopped saying them. I never stopped believing that I could control everything I wanted to. "This is who I am, Cloud, and if you can't handle that then you shouldn't be here. I will not stop until I want to and I will not listen to a damn thing you have to say unless I feel like it, so you can just go fuck yourself, kay?"

He shook his head here, looking at his feet rather than me. "No, Tifa, that's not who you are. This is not who you are. I know it, you know it, and your friends all know it. You are doing nothing more than run your life into the ground. I don't know why, and I may never know why because you've got it in your goddamned head that I don't have any right to know, and I respect that, but even though I don't understand why, I do know that this is going to end one way or another."

"Are you threatening me, Cloud? Have we been reduced to that level, the level where you have to threaten me in order to get your stupid little views across?" A single tear slid down my cheek then, though I don't think he saw it.

"No. I won't do a thing to you if you don't stop, and you know it. I will stay right here with you until you let me know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that you don't want me here." Cloud paused here, possibly for effect, possibly so that he could gather his own emotions. If tomorrow I forgot everything about that night, everything about that fight, I would still remember that pause. The exact moment when I heard his fragile heart break.

"You do want me, right?"

Too bad I couldn't answer him then. Maybe things wouldn't have turned out the way they had if I could have just held in the urge to vomit for a few more minutes. I would have told him that I didn't want him and he would have gone away and he wouldn't have been there to tenderly hold my hair back as I leant over the toilet bowl. He wouldn't have been by my side the next morning with a bottle of aspirin and a glass of water. He wouldn't have felt the need to stay and I wouldn't have felt the need to leave the way I did.

And so our roles had suddenly reversed. He began to support me, instead of the other way around. He began to work long hours and even longer weeks while I sat at home and drank myself into an unfeeling stupor. If he had any issues with himself or his past, or any of those things that he used to be concerned with, I didn't know about them. He was finally strong while I was weakening day by day and I could see that if I continued on, I would end up dragging him back down to where he had been and then what would have happened?

What else could have happened other than watching everything we'd worked for sliding slowly backwards? There was a different kind of strength that we needed here, not the new untested kind that he had. Not even the fragile, loving strength I'd shown earlier. We needed complete and unwavering, tried and tested, rock-solid strength.

And that was a kind of strength neither of us had in great supply, so the fights got worse and I got worse, and he got better, and I hated him more and more each day.

Now I have a good life, a good job, friends who don't know what happened to us all those years ago. I don't drink, I quit smoking, and I've even been eating healthier. I have everything I've ever wanted, everything except him and it hurts me every day that I let him go. I feel the pain digging deeper into my heart every time I breathe. I looked back on the way my life used to be, and how I hurt him so much just by being selfish when he never asked me for anything in return, and I want it to go back to the way it was in the old days.

There was a time that we had been happy, and I had gone and ruined it for whatever reason. Maybe I hadn't loved him as much as I thought I did. Maybe I resented him for being able to have a dark and dirty past, but I was nothing more than a good little girl from a small town that never had to work a day in her life before I graduated college. There were a number of reasons, but they all ended in one way, I destroyed myself and he rose like a phoenix from out of the ashes and I hated him for it in a way I never hope to hate another person in my life.

You never doubted my warped opinions on things like suicidal hate.

You made me compliment myself when it was way too hard to take

So I'll drive so fucking far away that I'll never cross your mind

And do whatever it takes in your heart to leave me behind

As I watch the suds swirl around the drain, I can't help but think about that last day. It was the day when I ended it once and for all. It was a week before I went back to his house that last time to say goodbye only to find that he had more than moved on. It was the day that I found out just how much he cared, and just how much that really scared me.

It was the day I tried to kill myself.

He had been working late again and the selfish part of my brain told me that it was because he couldn't stand to be around me. The rational part, the part that tended to be the first one to check out after a beer or two, would have told me that he was just trying to make more money in order to cover the debt made by my tendency of drinking all our money like it was going out of style. The rational part, I'm sorry to say, had left the building.

I began to cry and I couldn't stop. I tried to tell myself that there was nothing worth crying over, that I was Tifa Lockhart and I had always been that little girl that didn't cry, even when I had a broken leg and was trying to limp to the nurse's office. I tried to dry my eyes and keep them dry but before long the washcloth was too damp to do more than smear the liquid down my face.

For some reason being unable to dry my eyes at all was what set me off. I began to scream and throw anything that I came in contact with, whether it was valuable or not. Glass was everywhere and there had been a huge hole in the television set before I'd realized I'd thrown anything at it. I ripped sofa cushions and thrown chairs and smashed cabinets, doing anything and everything to forget the tears that just kept flowing.

To this day I don't know where the knife came from. One minute I'm screaming and throwing shit into walls and the next I'm sitting calmly on the floor in the kitchen staring at my reflection in the shining steel of a very sharp butcher's knife. My mind seemed to clear and the tears finally dried up as I moved the knife slowly around so that the light glinted off different angles. I was so entranced by the face my face was reflected in the blade, all distorted and warped, that I didn't hear the front door opening.

I had heard somewhere that you were supposed to cut up, along the vein, rather than across it if you were truly serious, and, at that moment, I was serious. I was so out of it that I didn't even feel any pain. I watched in a daze as the brilliant red goo that was my own blood seeped out of the long cut and began to pool around me, staining the tile floor a deep crimson.

The next thing I knew I was being hauled to my feet and someone was yelling at me, slapping my face to get my attention. As I looked into his clear, blue eyes I could feel every last bit of me breaking as a single tear rolled down his check to splash ineffectively into the gaping wound in my arm.

"Tifa, listen to me. Tifa!" Another slap. The room was slowly beginning to lose its focus. "Look at me, Tifa. Oh shit, shit, shit, shit!"

I closed my eyes, welcoming the darkness that awaited me behind my closed lids. He slapped me again, and I remember hearing a faint series of noises that turned out to be him calling 911. The rest turned into a blessed blur as I slowly began to slip further and further away from consciousness, praying that I would never wake up.

When I finally did open my eyes, it was days later and Cloud was curled up in a chair next to my bed with dark circles prominent under his eyes and a sallow look to his face the spoke of long nights staying up and watching over me. I watched him for nearly an hour as the nurses hovered around me, taking care not to wake him, whispering to me and each other that he had hardly slept a wink in four days and that I shouldn't bother him because he was under a heavy sedative for the time being since he was worrying himself into an unhealthy state.

He eventually woke up and, of course, he wanted to talk about my unfortunate accident. He wanted to know everything, even the things that I couldn't understand. He forced me to listen to him as he went on to naming all the thing he loved about me, all the good that I used to have shining inside of me. It was all a load of crap in my ears, but it seemed to make him feel better when I'd respond in the affirmative to his questions about knowing my mistake and coming to see that I had good qualities underneath everything else.

He kept telling me that he loved me and I would say the same, but each time I'd say it the words began to mean less and less until I was merely reading lines in some sick little play in order to keep him happy and off my back about the other, more painful, things I was keeping hidden beneath my seemingly calm exterior.

All the nurses were in love with him, this handsome, young man that would take off from work, sleep in an uncomfortable hospital chair, and never leave his girlfriend's side, not even for food or a cup of coffee until she had woken up. Doubly so considering that his girlfriend was in a self-induced coma due to alcohol poisoning and blood loss from the attempt she made on her life. The very same girlfriend who had been brought into the emergency room screaming that she hated Cloud from the very depths of her soul and that if she could, she would kill him, too, if only to stop him from being there to see her try and fail over and over.

He was there for me when I couldn't be there for anyone, much less myself, and all I could do was hate him for it. He didn't deserve me so two days after I was discharged from the hospital, I left him a note confessing everything I had to confess to him and then I left only to return a year later to find him in bed with his best friend, all thoughts of me apparently gone from his mind, just like I'd asked for them to be.

And I hated it.

Hate me today

Hate me tomorrow

Hate me for all the things I didn't do for you

Hate me in ways

Yeah ways hard to swallow

Hate me so you can finally see what's good for you

I hurried through the rest of my morning, bypassing breakfast in favor of picking something up on the way to work. They hadn't wanted to take me so long ago, not with my history of drinking and self-abuse, but I had eventually worn them down and now I was a benefits analyst for a highly revered benefits company. All I had to do was prove that I was taking my AA meetings seriously and that I had stopped abusing myself. It had been hard in the beginning, but it was getting better. I was getting better.

I still thought about him, dreamed about him, I would probably never let him go, but I didn't want to any longer. I saw him a year ago, on the subway. He was laughing with Sephiroth and they both looked so happy that I couldn't bear to been seen by them but I couldn't quite walk away either. He hated me and that drove him into the arms of his best friend, a decision that seems to have had an extremely positive effect on him. I couldn't have done better for him if I had been 100 per cent dedicated to our relationship.

A part of me hopes that he still thinks about the goods times we used to have, but I know his doesn't. He can't. He has to hate me for what I did, for the drinking, for the suicide, for leaving him the way I did. For everything I'd ever done in a selfish proclamation of a love I didn't feel. I'm glad he hates me.

It hurts but it fades day by day. Just knowing that he's out there, finally living life the way he was meant to live it makes the day go by faster. Perhaps if we had met right now instead of back then we could have made it work. Perhaps if he hadn't been depressed when we'd moved in together, we wouldn't be where we are now, separated by a distance that was much more than physical. Perhaps if I hadn't been so stupid we would still be living in that tiny apartment trying to make ends meet while being so completely in love that we just knew everything would work out in the end.

I feel like I've gone full circle and have finally come back around to be the person that I was always meant to be. I wish he could see the woman that I have finally become, but I know that there is no way to work that out now. I have to leave the past where it belongs the same way he did years ago in order to better take care of my problems. Sephiroth deserves such a loving and caring man. Someone who would go out on a limb for the one he loved without stopping to ask twice. I didn't deserve that back then and now that I do, I am too busy being happy for him that I don't bother to miss him the way I used to.

So I go about my life the way any other ordinary person does, remembering the past but not being mired down by it. I laugh with friends, I flirt with men and I've even had a boyfriend or two recently. I am finally whatever constitutes for normal in this strange world and all it took was destroying the first thing to ever make me happy.

And with a sad heart I say bye to you and wave

Kicking shadows on the street for every mistake that I had made

And like a baby boy I never was a man

Until I saw your blue eyes cry and I held your face in my hand

And then I fell down yelling "Make it go away!"

Just make a smile come back and shine just like it used to be

And then he whispered "How can you do this to me?"

"Tifa?" I spun around quickly not believing that I was hearing that voice saying my name again after so long. My heart began to beat quickly in response to a hidden emotion that I'd buried deep down inside all those years ago.

And there he was, a little more filled out, with color in his cheeks and a pleased smile on his face. His blue eyes, always so expressive no matter how hard he tried to hide it, glittered with what could only be described as joy. He waved at me and quickened his pace to catch up as I stopped and stood still, hardly daring to breathe in case this was an illusion.

"Hey, I thought that was you." He was close now, closer than he had been for years and years. I could have reached out and touched his face, just like I had done in the olden days. I could have run the tips of my fingers over his cheekbones and down to trace his lips. I could have leaned forward and latched onto him and kissed him just like I used to do back when he had been mine and mine alone.

I could have done all those things, but all I did was smile.

"Hello, Cloud. It's been awhile, hasn't it?" I asked politely, every synapse in my system firing at the speed of light as I tried to choke down the flood of emotion that threatened to rise up and drown me in its undercurrents once more.

"It sure has." He seemed to feel some bit of discomfort now, as he began to shift his weight from foot to foot, probably waiting for me to acknowledge that I knew him more than an acquaintance. "I've missed you, you know. I wanted to say goodbye to you that day you came back to town, but you were gone before anyone could find out where you had been staying. I also wanted to say thank you."

"Thank you?" I repeated, stunned that he would have anything to thank me for.

"Yeah." He looked up at me now, his eyes boring a hole into my soul the same way they used to. "I know it might seem like it's in poor taste, but since you seem to be doing fine I do have to say thank you. Thank you for helping me when I thought I was going to drown in my own thoughts and thank you for pushing me to find my own happiness. There were years when I was angry with you, and I wanted to hate you so badly that it hurt sometimes, but I never could bring myself to do it fully."

"What are you trying to say, Cloud?" I asked coldly, not wanting to seem too friendly or too interested. I couldn't get involved with him again, not even as a friend. Not when I had finally come so far away from where I had left him.

"That I want to stay in touch with you now. You were and always will be my friend first and foremost in my mind." He seemed so sincere as he said this that I could feel what little was left of my heart tearing to shreds.

"Anyways, I have to go now but here's my card." He placed a small square of paper in my slack grip and grinning that spine-melting grin. The same grin that used to have me bending over backwards just to get him to do it again and again. Just to let the light into the dark times the way I wanted him to. "Maybe we can get together and have dinner or something sometime. Sephiroth would love to get to know you better, I know it. What do you say?"

"I..." I wanted so badly to say yes. Every last bit of me was screaming to accept his proposal, maybe set up something for that very night, but there was an image of him in my brain, an image that will never go away. The image of his leaning over my quickly fading body as the tears streamed from those magnificent eyes as he begged for me to hold onto life for just a little bit longer. The empty, haunted look as he begged for me to stay with him, to love him. "I'll think about it."

He smiled again, a true smile that lit up the surrounding area with that special warmth that only he could produce, and then he was gone like he'd never even been there. All I had was the little card with his name and number on it to prove that he'd been there at all.

As I watched to people walk past me, each one so intent on their own concerns and their own perfect lives that they didn't notice the poor woman whose heart was slowly but surely breaking apart all the careful repairs it had already made, I was letting go of everything again. I was retreating back into that place where I didn't care about anyone or anything. That place where I was the worst thing in the world, as well as the only thing, and the worst thing was always the first to go.

The little, white card drifted to the ground slowly, twirling in the light breeze to lie forgotten to the sands of time on the concrete on a crowded city street during the middle of the morning rush, never to be seen by me again.

Hate me today

Hate me tomorrow

Hate me for all the things I didn't do for you

Hate me in ways

Yeah ways hard to swallow

Hate me so you can finally see what's good for you

For you

For you

As I watched the red liquid swirling around in the bottom of the bathtub that night, I knew that I was finally doing the right thing. I was finally erasing myself from the lives of those I'd claimed to love by taking away their only reminder of me.

The bright flickering from the fire that was building in the other room seeped under the door as I could feel the life pouring out of me in waves. My own distorted image looked back at me from the blade of the bloody knife. The white porcelain of the sink and toilet seemed to be staring at me, mocking my every decision that led me up to this point, reflecting the words that had been printed onto that simple, little business card that I had so carelessly dropped. Carelessly the way I had done everything else in my life.

The fire was burning brighter now, picking up the trail of gasoline I had left behind for it to find. Soon it would make its way through the bathroom door and then whatever was left of me by that time would be consumed in it's bloodthirsty hunt for fuel to feed its raging embers.

All would be gone, all would be erased. He could stop thinking about me, stop thanking me and inviting me to dinner. He could take me out of his life the same way I took him out of mine so, so very long ago. The things I had wanted to do for him ran through the scattered portions of my mind that were still able to form thought and the fire felt like a warm caress on my chilled skin and then the world heaved violently once last time and then... And then...

Everything went dark for the very last time...