This is what happens when you have too much time on your hands.

If you need me, I will find you...

I found myself walking through the dark shadows of the night, willing my pain and isolation to dissapear. I felt desperate, I felt confused, and I felt angry. I was angry with myself, most of all, because I let myself get to this point. The point of madness.

And then he was there. Like I knew he would be.

He always showed up when I least expected it, and I never expected it because when he did show up, it was always when I felt like diving into the shallow end of an empty pool. These moments came and went, and so did he, but he was always there, lurking behind me, inside me, waiting, hoping. And I was dreaming of him.

He took me in his grasp, so beautiful that I lost my breath for too many seconds, yet so ugly and scarred from the past that I recoiled in fear and disgust. But when he kissed me, I regained my composure. I regained my senses. I was alive again.

He had a name, once. He was a living, breathing human. At some point, he turned into a phantasm, a cruel fantasy, a ghost that haunted my soul. But he was real. When we kissed, when our flesh merged together into one piece of fiery skin marked in a red glow, he was real.

I wrapped myself in him, forgetting my problems for the moment. Forgetting that my position in life was pointless, forgetting that the man I loved more than life itself had betrayed me since the day we met, always betraying me. I was dark when I once was light. I was nobody when I once I was me.

The darkness, my darkness. The flesh, the sin took me back to the place where he had come to exist. He whispered in my ear things I didn't want to hear and couldn't understand, things I thrived to hear and the things I knew by heart.

My heart stopped beating when his hot and rancid breath caressed my ear. The touch of his hot flesh made me feel things no human was capable of feeling. I screamed, but my silence was deafening.

Sometimes, I wondered where this dream world would come from. Did it only exist in my mind, in my heart, both? Or was it real? Who was he? Was he the devil, was he God? Why did he enter me and take my heart and keep it as his prize, his captive?

He once was real, but I betrayed him. I betrayed him for a betrayer and now I was the one being betrayed. He once was real, seen by the world, flesh and blood and all the pieces that fit together.

The word "soulmate" whispered from my lips when our red pulsating skins melted together like chocolate in the sun, but he would not hear it. This word, soulmate, angered him and he tried hurting me, tried to void me, but I couldn't. He was the void, and I fit so peacefully into the void.

I was stagnant. I was drifting. My mind raced back to the day when we first met, a day that I wonder still exists in the whole scheme of time and earth and existence. He told me, that very day, "If you need me, I will find you." I didn't understand. I was young, I was filled with hope and dreams and desires. But he never left me. He lived inside me. He evaporated, gleamed, glistened and boiled and melted. He was a ghost, and I was the haunted. But he was real.

As he took me again and gain, I started to regain my sanity, as I always did. But there was a new fiereceness inside him that would have scared me if I had the capacity to be scared. My flesh became cool and goosebumps formed and I felt human again. But at the sound of his unearthly whisper, I became a ghost again.

"Be with me, forever. Betray him. Betray yourself."

I recoiled. I bled. I ached, but I listened. He had never made such a request before. It always seemed right that we met like this - in a cloud, in my mind, in my heart, in the darkness.

But he continued to take me and my body rose to meet his advances. I knew I would do what he demanded. I was dead inside and he made me alive. The things that had meant so much once upon a time no longer existed. My hope was extinguished. The things I cherished, now just dust on concrete, oil on the highway, dusk on an unending day. I would do what he wanted, because I had no other choice. If I needed him. He would find me. He found me.

I found my way back to the place that held my earthly existence. My betrayer stood before me, demanding answers to questions that never had answers, we were once in love, but we were never soulmates. He was not like my darkness.

For the last moment of his life, I kissed my betrayer softly on his betraying lips. He was startled, and I saw an unrecognizable fear in his eyes. It made me sad to know that he knew I was betraying him, but as I fired the shot that would end his life, I was free. Free of my betrayer. But the one I betrayed, my soulmate, betrayed me. I needed him, he would find me if I need him, but I could not find him. He did not come. I was red with blood, scared of the coming winds, angry that my betrayer could no longer betray me.

My darkness never came back. My darkness got its revenge. As I betrayed the flesh and blood and love and soul that betrayed me, my darkness got his ultimate revenge in betraying the betrayer. And when I fired the shot into my own aching, bleeding, angry heart I realized that my soulmate never existed. My soulmate was my heart, and my heart had long ago died. My soul stayed alive, but when it died, nothing was lost.