Our tv show, the one we used to watch all the time, is playing in the background and yet I can only barely hear it. I'm scraping the inside of my nails and the scuff scuff tck sound is grating, annoying, painful. I can't stand it when he gets like this. I want to tell you that I need him, that I care. On nights like tonight, the grating scrape of nail on nail is soothing. It's better than his crying and much better than silence.I heard him crying over the phone, he was whimpering like some wounded puppy. I told him she was trouble, I told him to leave her alone, but like a fly to honey so too a man to a vindictive ex wife. It's not really her though, He tolerates her to see his daughter. I keep telling him nothing in this world is worth that kind of pain. He shouldn't risk letting that woman kill him just for a moment with that little girl. What use is he to his daughter if he is dead?And he dobuts she'd kill him. But she's gotten him so close before. I'm surprised he survived this long. God knows I've pulled his ass out of hot water too many times already.I remember when it started too. She had a hatred for me, thought I was the reason he left her. No, no! Couldn't be her manipulating self-centered neediness...But I digress, He walked in the room and wouldn't leave my mind for months like the addiction I was picking up, every day I wanted another hit of his drug, another deep breath of what was his fresh air to the stale cigarette smoke of what my life had become.He asked me if I knew what darkness was. I told him I lived with it inside my very soul.He said it was nice to be home. It was nice... It was nice? I knew what pain was, what deep sorrow and lonliness was, I knew what it was like to not only have darkness with oneself, but to feel it inside, as part of my very soul. I knew maddness, pain, deep oblivion... He was no such comprehension. I let him claim to be, it made me laugh like a parent at their child when they jump off the roof believing they can fly. But his self image was a lie. He was no super-man, he was no devil, no evil no hell. He was merely human, flawed, scared, self-loathing human, just like me.When I met him I though he was devioius, strong, unfeeling. I hated it, but it intrigued me. since then I've discovered he is just like every other weak-willed self-masturbratory, self-loathing, societal-paricite out there. I no longer look at him in awwe and wonder and I no longer feel he is my god.For a while he took me away from the god I feared I followed. Being human we are all twisted, cruel and self-serving. I have crushed hearts, broken homes, ended lives and lived on to be indifferent about it. I thought he could be the embodyment of something different but similar enough, the next step up in my twelve step program out of Hell. I felt I could idolize him, emulate him. Be strong like him and ompassionate like him. He was weaker then me. The Bastard, he's never even killed, he lies worse than I do, and he fears. Damnable traits. I hate the idea of the society's fortitude, based solely in softness. I'll admitt my presence and part in the race but only on condition; you must understand I hate being associated with anything so weak.So I distance myself from every lover that comes along, every man who I ever thought was worthy, who showed me he wasn't. One truely was so perfectly dark and cruel, he's dead now. Another made me believe he was until I saw it, his weakness in his eyes when he looked at me. Those soft blues and his slurred words, I Love You they said and he was helpless in my presence. I was left to defend him as he wallowed in self-pity.Never again.