| Later H. and I are lying on our backs in the heat. He's talking about politics again, he's become aware of some new atrocity to do with the patriot act and the price of gas and the prisoners at guantanamo bay. He quotes a few of his favorite bumper stickers and I agree, more enthusiastic than I feel... Yes, but it's more complicated than that.
He is ecstatic on the day he finds out that the tides have crashed down on Thailand, obliterating large chunks of the city where his ex-finance, the third or the fourth one, lives with her snotty parents who didn't like him because he wasn't rich or Thai.
He has a library full of books he hasn't read, except for the ones on satanism by a balding old magician and he thinks somehow that Satan has done this for him.
Satan never did anything for anyone but himself. why would he suddenly start with your ex?
He really does want to destroy the world. He wants to wipe the slate clean of the whores and the republicans and the baggage of the Christian value based systems that oppress him. He wants to set fire to large sections of the countryside and watch it burn itself down to the terrible blank purity of ash. Mostly i think he just wants to show them all he doesn't need them. He wants to watch vines and mold and branches break down the rocks that senators once stood on discussing what to do about the rain forests and cougars turn and snap and eat their keepers after spending almost their whole lives in plastic cages in the sanctuary up the street because he never really got over the initial shock of the cruelty of the world. Somehow between this never-ending debate of ours I, who don't even consider myself human, find myself taking the side of humanity against this tide of death and destruction.
"But if you destroy the world, where would we live?"
He says we wouldn't need to, we could live in hell, but the truth is I know he's not that brave, and the way he describes it, like an endless battle... I want my soul to live somewhere where there are flowers, not miles and miles of scorched earth and the smell of fear.
He seems to think he's someone special, that he'll be powerful there for having been faithful. I somehow thought that the devil was against faith. Wasn't he the questioning one, the one who refused to just take god's word for it and struck out on his own?
I do not love him... I always knew that. I said I did because I wanted to be in love with someone and because he paid for everything, but I can never bring myself to tell him the truth or to put on that ring, the one that looks like a silver claw holding a tiny ruby like a glistening human heart. I will make him promises, but not ones I am afraid to break. I like him, though, and so I try to find something in him to shine a light on, to pull him back up from wherever he's hiding in the dark. The thing that ends up terrifying me, the thing I cannot accept is that there isn't anything to pull up. There isn't even a hole for him to have fallen into. Nothing ever happened to him: there was no one who hit him or broke his spirit or touched him in a way that made him afraid to be touched. In his own words it was just that "No one was ever there and I'm ALWAYS alone! Always!" like a child who pouts because his mother wants to sleep instead of watching Sesame Street with him. That's all. To someone like me, who is used to curling up in the dark with no company but her own thoughts, this seems like nothing... ridiculous. How could something like this have damaged him beyond repair?
I yell and rage at the problems of the world, but I never wanted to destroy it. if I did that, the things I love, the books and all the beautiful cities i haven't seen yet and the Sphinx and the children who really believe in faeries and the neon and the songs would be gone, too. For all its problems, I want to fix the world, not to end it. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. | 
