excerpts from a book I'll never write II

I love you like nobody's business

Maybe it doesn't even matter all that much when you'd turned from the best friends of my best friend to mine. Only that you had, and that I was proud. I was proud and beyond honoured to have earned a place at your table, it being perhaps the most important one I have ever earned. And I need you to always remember this because after I'm gone, you are not going to like me all that much. You are going to hate me for a while, and you're going to forget why you gave me that place at all. Why you let me take your souls and do with them as I please, and why you let me love you like I do.

I know this because when Mary died, there were days when I couldn't remember my own name. And as I watched everyone I loved fall to their knees, bleeding out all that love she'd planted within them, I wished we'd never known her, never given her that place at the table.

I swear I don't mean to scare you, but that pain is going to do unspeakable things to you before it's done with you, and it is just us important to me to tell you this as it is to step in front of thousands of people and tell your stories because what I wouldn't have given for someone to have told me this before I'd lied there on the floor for weeks, blacked out from all the drugs I'd been taking to erase her name from my tongue.

***

Maybe it's true. Maybe I've made my way too far up in your business, made it a bigger mess than it should've been. And maybe I love you too much for my own good, but I do. I love you like nobody's business, and I'll be damned if there ever comes a day when I don't.