One frank conversation late into the night was all it took, to tell her how I feel. Right any misconceptions in her mind. Perhaps they still linger, though I cannot allow them to fester. I realise now that to do so would be to let this moment we share pass me by, these moments we share. For to look into her eyes now I see certainty. Certainty that her love for me is as true as mine for hers.
It feels like the most natural thing in the world, to have and to hold her. My friendship with her, our love. It has always felt right in my heart. And strangely that is the thing that I have feared the most.
But what of fear? The shaking of my bones at the depth of what it is we experience. It is present that is for certain but I no longer intend to be a slave to it. There are those who will make attempt to sow discord between us, to entrench her doubts. Let them, I will never allow any such feelings to take sway again. I cannot.
For she has given me something I have long craved, love, acceptance. The belief in myself that I am not an individual who is inherently wicked but the produce of my circumstance. I'm not sure I believe that assessment myself entirely. The things I have done, whether coldly or through the hate in my heart following my father's murder.
It has been hard for me not to hate.
The underworld that took me prisoner when I first came to Eriador, those brigands, they broke my spirit. They killed my father, when I thought that I might have a life, a new beginning. They took it from me. When everything is torn and oft violently from your grasp whether it be your freedom or the ones you love. Hate is the only feeling that makes sense.
That hate was coupled with resentment. Resentment for the burdens I was forced to bear. I found myself grasping for comfort where I could. I made the mistake of pledging myself to a woman looking back on it I was not entirely suited. Did I love her? I do not know. She betrayed me and I will never forgive her for that or the mistaken assumption which it lead to. But I cannot absolve myself entirely from blame.
It was the hate in my heart which drove my actions to do ultimately what I did. To take my dagger and plunge it multiple times into the breast of the only person who made my life even slightly bearable during those years of captivity. It is a memory I have revisited over and over in my head. Like an out of body experience. Those features, contorted as they were and twisted in anger. Blood boiling and spraying everywhere as the crazed man. A monster, brought that blade down. Again, and again. A deadly mistake, directed at the wrong person.
I know what hate does to a man, I saw it in my father. It tears him apart, drives him to the point of obsession. Turns him into something he is not. Something he swore he'd never become.
Whoever that creature is, it has been my childhood friend and her kindness, her belief in me which keeps him buried, the beast within, he dwells within and yet he is not me. I do not think the hate in me will ever fully dissappear, I cannot say the beast will never stir. Will never take over again. And yet, he is not me. And I am not him. We are separate entities and I will not allow my life to be defined by what I have lost and consumed by him ever again.
I need to live my life on the basis of hope, of what could be. Not on what once was. My experiences have shaped me this is true. But I need not be defined by them forever. The violent urges that remain within me, the need whenever I saw a man or a woman as wicked as my step-mother, to right their wrongs, to expel them from the world as though my actions were simply a means of cosmic justice, retribution. I see now that I was blinded my own hatred. I have never killed entirely from a sense of altruism alone. I was doing it for me. For myself. Each corpse in service of a blood-lust, a vengeance for the misfortunes and injustice fate in itself has meted out to me.
I have written much of my fear. To a degree of my hate. I will not be a slave to either of them.
When I was at my lowest ebb in recent memory, in my desperation to love, to feel something. The disaster that befell of pursuing a young girl so self-destructive. I could not sleep, I could not eat. My childhood friend took me into her arms, even though at the time her heart belonged to another. When I felt myself losing my mind, driven to thoughts of slaughter and there was naught in my heart but the singular obsession of striking down the one's responsible for her murder. Of killing indiscriminately. Whether they be innocent or no.
She soothed me, she brought me back from it when it could have been my undoing. She was the balm that my heart had long cried out for. I thought of happier days when we were both children to all intents and purposes. Though, she had the body of an emerging woman even then. All the curves in the right places. To think, that given my long experience with women the prime concern back then I had was to simply figure out how I could pluck up the courage to talk with her.
Awkward, stumbling and blushing buffoon that I was whenever I saw her. They were simpler times. More innocent. Before, as far as I see it. The rot set in and fate took it's course. I had thought that boy had gone forever, he feels like a distant memory and yet she still seems to see him in me whether I do or not. Pure, untainted.
No, I will never be so again.
But amidst all the darkness, she has helped me see...
There is a light after all.
