Ivan,

I met a man yesterday who could have been me. 

I didn’t really think that when I first met him.  When I first met him I was trying to kill him.  He’d kidnapped children, tried to bind a demon into one of them, and he killed one of my friends.  From the moment we defeated him and Gene the frustratingly pure knocked him out instead of killing him I wanted to end him.  I didn’t even trust myself not to do it in the middle of the night so I focused on taking care of the children… and you know how much I loath children. 

And then…  When we got him to the town and I questioned him, thinking it would be good to find out who he had killed, he had a horrible story.  A tale of woe that makes my problems look pale but do you know what he wanted?  Why he decided to summon a demon?

He wanted to be numb.

He wanted not to feel the pain or the fear or anything else.  And for a moment I was looking in a mirror.

Ever since I met you, you taught me that drinking was the perfect way to ignore the people who didn’t matter.  It was the way to forget the fear of things we’d faced.  It was the way to end fights.  It was the answer.  I was so young when we met and you were the most perfect man I’d ever seen.

Jovi and I always joked you would be the death of us.  Your crazy adventures, your headlong rushes into trouble.  But we followed you because you always seemed to get us out of everything, you seemed to know what to do in every situation.

But really I think we were lucky.  We were very very lucky and you just had to keep pushing that luck.  You pushed and pushed and then you died on me you ass.

Ever since then all I have wanted was to be numb.

I have tried so damned hard to numb myself like you did that I pushed Jovi away.  I learned to make my own damned alcohol so I would always have it at hand and now…

Now I’m afraid to be numb.

I’m afraid of what lengths I might go to not to feel.

But I don’t know what else to do.

Meli