love him for it.
Love that he stands over me...watching.
But he is also diaphanous, and I can never hold onto him no matter how hard I grip.
I often wake crying.
But none of that can matter, right? Fantasies are for children, and I have to grow up at some point.
Grant can help with that. He is helping, and I am a selfish brat for feeling what I felt today when the rain was falling so hard that I couldn’t see the world around me as a fantasy came to life.
It can’t matter.
I am getting married.
So why does it feel like I can’t breathe?
Ari
June 12, 2019
There’s really no reason I am who I am.
Most people, when learning that a man is a killer, when hearing that he has the ability to brutally and callously end the life of another, hope to delve into his past and find that he suffered some type of misfortune that can easily explain a switch being flipped in his mind that changed him from what is considered normal into what is essentially a monster.
They look for an explainable formula, a convenient checklist of events or influences that make the promise that not every person has it in them to be so heartless or cruel.
Trauma is often a likely excuse, a pretty wrapping that can be smoothed over and tied with ribbon to help soften or even cage the psyche of a man who lacks empathy or guilt. It helps make the monster more palatable, even if his crimes are still horrendous. It helps soothe the minds of those who wonder if they could also be in a place where they kill without concern for the value of another life.
I have no such trauma. No youthful symptoms that should have shed light on who I would become. No warning signs that were ignored and led me into a career where I kill for money...or that trapped me in an obsession that had completely taken over my life.
I came from a middle income family, parents that never divorced. I was an only child, spoiled because of it. I had pets that lived happily into old age. I was never bullied. I didn’t endure poverty, or hatred, or really want for anything.
Essentially, my life was ridiculously normal, textbook maybe for average America. I didn’t suffer, and I didn’t cause others to suffer. Maybe a better description for my life would be that it was utterly boring.
And maybe that’s the clue people missed.
Despite having what I needed, something essential was absent. Not at first. I’d lived the first ten years of my life completely content. I’d done what all little boys do: played, explored, behaved in all the ways I was taught.
But then it was like the world shifted one day, and I woke up with a part of me that was so bleak and hollow, it ached to be filled with something I couldn’t name. A piece was missing, as if it had fallen away when I slept that night and rolled under the bed or into the crack of a floor board, never to be found.
It needed to be filled.
As I grew older, I experimented. Partying, sex, sports, academics, hobbies, you name it. I tried everything, but was never able to fully satisfy the beast.
Until I found the value of easy money.
It was an accident that I even stumbled into the life. One job. One night where the inscrutable man I worked for at the time mentioned he had a side project for me. How he knew I’d accept without telling the police of his offer, I don’t know. Maybe like attracts like, or recognizes it, at least. But the offer was made:
If this man dies, this amount will be in your bank account.
My hand didn’t shake the first time, which is often how you hear of it. I didn’t care to ask details. I simply did what I was asked, and the money appeared in my account, easy as that.
And through the years, I’ve honed my skill. My name spread through networks. I made a career out of something most would consider horrifying, and I have no issues sleeping because of it.
It filled that hollow part inside me for a period of time, at least until the night I killed Liam Kane.
That night, the hollow part was ripped open worse than ever. I turned around at the sound of a voice and knew I was empty.
Seeing Adeline for the first time in her white nightgown, hovering over the body