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Thanatos speaks:
There are many myths, falsehoods, misunderstandings and outright lies mixed with truth about who I am. Some believe I’m the devil. Some believe I’m the grim reaper. There are myths surrounding what I do, how I usher souls from one realm to another, that I actively participate or just wait idly until I get a message, like some number at a deli counter and I help the next in line. Some think I’m a god or a demon.

I was not born or created. I exist, nothing more, nothing less.  I walk this realm for millennia. I feel the darkness, I do not control it. I feed off emotions but they do not sustain me. I sip them, like fine wines or butterfly dipping their proboscis to sip nectar. Human emotions are like cocaine, or heroin, or alcohol or any addiction; once you touch the depths and see the universe within you chase it forever. I do not need anything to survive.  However, the delicious, deleterious nature of a vessel so gloriously sensitive to the emotional vibrations of the membrane between worlds is a rare find that I crave it as if it is life itself. I am not meant to interfere with the choice of death’s time. I have, on occasion, interfered and prevented or prolonged the time of death for particular jewels.

The swirl of dark emotions — depression, sadness, longing, grief, loneliness, yearning, regret, shame, rage and all the rest that cause indescribable aches within — are when I’m at my most perverse. I can’t control myself, can’t stop myself from enjoying such suffering. Happiness and all the light emotions are not as powerful. For me, they give but momentary bliss whereas the dark emotions surge an overwhelming rush of ecstasy that lasts far longer.

I try explain all this in a poor attempt to explain why I can not let M go. She electrifies me unlike any creature in all my years. She has a well of darkness inside that swells through every aching crevice and trembles her body like an earthquake ripping the earth asunder and when she releases her pain in racking sobs, well, even thinking about it makes my lips parched like a desert needing water. She gives herself to me both begging for release and needing the power she holds over me. She doesn’t understand what she does to me nor why I can not release her. It is love, perhaps, but oh so much more.

M speaks:
My daily life outwardly appears no different then the millions of others walking this planet. I survive the mundane and yearn for the profound, the profane. I yearn to change the world at the same time wanting to be invisible. I go to a boring office job that pays the bills. I drink with friends, celebrate birthdays, walk the dogs and sip coffee in the morning on the ride to work. And I am in love with death.

I am depressed, as the doctors tell me, and I feel the sadness but it is so much more. In the ordinary world I feel insane because it’s like I feel the fires of the universe, walking a membrane between realms, unable to explain the strange vibration that hums in the back of my thoughts all the time. I can taste the sadness, I can hear the black tar bubbling in that hallow within, I can smell the burnt smoke floating from the fires that I see burning in a dark place that I can not touch. In every day, I survive. I tamp down the sadness, the shame, the anger, the yearning because I can’t explain it. I sit in therapy and listen, wanting to find a way out to the happiness, but I can’t explain why nothing I hear is truth.

My only relationship is with Thanatos. He doesn’t cringe from my drama, doesn’t tire of my tragedy, doesn’t find me retched or reject my darkness expecting me to “lighten up.” It is a rare thing to be accepted so completely. At the same time, it hurts being with him because he has the power to release me from my pain and refuses. So we are stuck in this dance of death. When I am with him, however, to feel his ecstasy, to see the heights he reaches when I fall to my knees, the way he takes my darkness and matches it with such utter, raw, pleasure sends me spinning into orgasmic heights as if I am almost touching a higher realm.

We are addicted to each other. I yearn for death and he yearns for my well of darkness. He loves me but will never say it. I both love and hate him profoundly.