I hate him.

I wish sometimes that I was strong enough to love him, even if it is just for the small shred of the old kindness I see deep behind the cold in his eyes. But I'm not strong enough. To think, I am strong enough to hate with such fire that it sometimes frightens me. I am strong enough to joke away the questions of my bruises and smile even when my heart rots away in my chest and it feels like my very soul is falling away into a growing darkness. I'm strong enough to do a lot of things I once thought impossible, but not to love the only one I feel truly knows me.

And isn't that weakness?

Truly knows me… He does, and it frightens me more than I thought possible, and when you're as involved with him as I am, you become truly familiarized with fear. Doesn't that tell you a lot about this? About us? He looks at me sometimes, with those chilling eyes, and sees something in me.

Is it something he likes? I don't know what I want the answer to be anymore.

I hate him. I hate him for what he has done to me, all the things he has changed because he couldn't stay dead! I hate the pain, the scars, the desire, the tears, the blood, the fear and the long wonderfully forbidden nights of isolation from whatever reality is outside my bedroom.

I hate that he has made me fear his softness. That a soft kiss, a gentle caress or a careless, warm glance fills me with something close to panic. I can handle pain, I can handle wounds and that reckless anger he sometimes shows, but not that horrifying sense of foreboding those small things gives me. I hate him for that.

But still…

I love all the things I've hated from the start.

How did he do this to me? How is it possible for him to make me love misery, to break my dreams the way he does? When did he begin this? It feels like we have been doing this forever. I must be close to a breakdown. No human being can handle this… torture much longer than I already have.

I wonder sometimes if he already is killing me. If I will be long dead and already mourned by the time he decides my screaming, begging, bleeding and moaning isn't good enough anymore. For some reason that thought gives me a dark sense of satisfaction, as if I am winning a battle that already has been fought for too long.

I asked him a question, one he didn't answer. I asked him straight to his face if he would kill me if this continued.

I know the answer is yes.

And I would kill myself if I stopped this. I know I could never be able to handle how… empty life would become.

I was fucked from the start.