sit patiently and watch her pack three large suitcases lying on their bed. Just the profile of her face brings tightness in my chest, making it almost difficult to breath. She methodically, as if in a trance, goes through each drawer of the dresser, slowly packing one item at a time. She glances to the night stand, a picture of her and him sits there, a tear forms in her eye and slides down her cheek…I’m dying again…will he never leave her, or she him? Better is what? Everything I have driven myself to become is now in the past. …. Where is the future?

Six weeks before and its mid afternoon: we’re sitting in an outdoor bar across the channel from the mainland. She’s there, across the table from me. A half finished rum and coke sits in front of her and she picking small pieces from a damp napkin while blankly watching the ferry run back and forth across the channel, between reality and this.

After almost a year I still can’t look at her without getting that sinking feeling, emptiness in my very core. We’ve come together through pain. In the beginning it was separate pain from separate lives, but now it has become common and shared, pain attracting pain.

I reach across the table and take her hand, a simple act that only in the last two weeks I have gathered the courage to initiate. It’s warm and for an instant she reacts and returns the pressure from my grip. She smiles a smile of something between pleasure and sympathy.

I say. “ I love you Sharon, you know that don’t you? You can ask me for anything and it will be done…no matter what…no matter what.” She looks at me and I know she is going to cry again. “John, I know and I’m sorry.”

God, she’s said it again. “Please don’t say you’re sorry because I’m in love with you. You don’t have to be sorry for that. It’s my burden to bear for now, and I still hold hope someday you can feel the same for me. You’re not responsible and to blame for every emotion and wrong in this screwed up deal, Sharon.”

The corners of her mouth are turning down and her eyes are reddening again. I’ve seen the beginning of it so many times in the past three months I can recognize it from across a room.

“ If only we were fresh and clean, John. If only all the old things could be new again.”

Suddenly, as if just wakened. “ I have to go. I don’t feel right being here with you.”

She pulls the hand away, gets up and walks to her car without another word. It’s as if something has just been physically ripped from my whole, a portion of life extinguished.

We’re here again, standing at the railing, watching a cargo ship depart the jetties, heading for some foreign port. Heaven would have to be, us on the bridge deck, gazing astern, watching the land and our old lives fade into the distance.

I hold her hand again, comfortable and content at being allowed to only that. But, just that is an act that warms me to the soul. I can tell by looking at her it has gotten much worse. Her eyes are swollen from the hours spent in tears. Her hands visibly shake. He’s spent another night in one of his rages, accusing her of affairs, of spending all of his money. She again, is the reason for all the wrongs in his life.

I plead. “Please Sharon, you have to get out of there, please, he’s going to kill you. Please don’t let this continue. I love you so much it hurts and this is killing me as well as you.”

Pressure from her hand and she says. “ I know John, and I don’t want this to hurt you. I feel so guilty about being here; I think maybe it is an affair.”

“Sharon, we’ve done no more than hold hands. I would give anything I now have in my life if it could be more, but that’s all we’ve done. It’s just two people dying from the same disease, the disease of loneliness.”

We separate as always, her going ahead, across the ferry and out of sight before I leave the deck. I watch her walk across the shell parking lot to her car. She has aged five years in the past six months. No longer that bounce, bright smile, and uninhibited laugh (a laugh I haven’t heard in weeks). That laugh that so attracted me to her has disappeared into his madness. Now we share only the mutual hurts and I alone with that one great hope and desire for her closeness.

She drives onto the ferry, it leaves the dock and makes it’s way across the channel. As she exits and disappears from view I spot his car pulling from the far side parking lot. I think it’s his car, it’s too far to be sure, but I think.

She has told me she is going to see her dad, to talk with him. “John, I need to talk with someone other than you about this. I don’t know my feelings, what I want any longer. My god, what’s happened to my life?” I tell her I understand.

Two hours later she walks into their house and there he is, raving, throwing things. He is completely out of control, more so than she has ever seen him. Shocked, she sees it for the first time, a pistol in his hand. “You’re doing it again. I knew it was true. It was true all along. You’ve both played me like a fool. Everyone knows, my friends, people I work with, and all those damn people you work with; the ones hiding it from me. I look stupid, and you’re going to pay now. You bitch…you bitch…. I hate you.”

The phone rings, it’s him on the other end. That insane voice filled with hate blast from the earpiece. “You did it, you son-of-bitch, you’ve finally broken us up. You’ll pay now, you bastard…. Live with this… Live with this.” On his end, the gun comes up and without a second’s hesitation the hammer falls. The phone explodes in my ear. “No god, he’s done it.” I knew he would. I tried to tell her, time and time again. “He’s going to kill you and that’ll be the end for both of us because I’ll have to kill him, there’ll not be a choice for me. I’ll have to.”

I bolt from the apartment, grabbing my gun from the cabinet on the way out. I drive at an insane pace toward her house. As I turn down the street I can see the flashing lights of three police cars in the driveway and street. From behind, an ambulance screams into my rearview mirror and I pull to the side, letting him speed by. I approach as two EMT’s enter the house.

Parked down from her house and across the street I turn the light off and wait. When the police bring him out I will calmly walk to them and finish what should have been done ten years ago. I will then make the decision about myself, for there is nothing left.

Two days later and I’m standing among the crowd, next to the gravesite. His family is there. Her family is there. Some are crying, some are in a state of shock; none can believe it, even yet. Except me, I believe…I accept. And, he was wrong about me as much as he was wrong about us. I can live with it. I can easily live with it. It’s one of the least hard things I’ve had to live with in the past year.

My god, what am I thinking.

What kind of person have I become?

She’s had hold of me for a year now, and in that time my good sense and self-respect has spiraled down; as all matter is devoured by a black hole, I think my decency is being sucked in, never to see the light of day again.

I know what I have become, for I’m thinking. “At last I’m free. It’s finally over; things can go forward. I don’t care what I’ve become, it’s much, much, better this way, better for all of us.”

Someone please tell me the gain is going to be worth what I’ve lost. I have lost none other than me. No matter what I win, a part of me is down in that dark hole and the weight of the hurts, the deceptions, the lies, will never allow it to see the light of day again. It will reside in that sub-world until I am as he is.

She stands there, between her mother and father, face blank and pale. It’s all I can do to stay here, not go to her, to comfort her, even though I know any thing I would say expressing my condolences and sorrow would be a sick lie.

His last act, even in his own death, was pre-designed to hurt her, to make her responsible for his end. To that brain we were the blame for all his paranoia, for all those demons walking through his mind. A sicker, more controlling individual, I have never met. This man epitomized every quality I have despised in a human being. To the very end he had, in his mind, maintained control and extracted a last portion of guilt. A poor substitute for a human being. A being this world won’t miss for long.

His parents stand twenty feet from me and I’m thinking. “ Get on with it, shovel dirt and pack it until that rotten bastard never feels the air again. Suffocate his ass as he has suffocated everyone connected to him for the past twenty years.”

His parents are standing there and I’m thinking this. I know them. They know me. We are, they have thought, friends.