Seeing Father Breton, my old mentor, didn’t help me—he thinks my conversations with Faith are just ‘dreams’.
I feel so disoriented because I know the encounters are real.
It make me wonder though if this is purgatory or limbo? I need to know what state I'm in.
Faith is not my guide like Beatrice, leading Dante through the Inferno―she's not some idealized woman but flesh and blood... and she's the one I've always counted on to be there for me.
I just wish I had been there for her.
This is insane. I mean, just look at me. How pathetic can I get?
Can't form a relationship with my female partner, even though we’re attracted to each other—and still mourning my dead wife who visits me nights.
Not a good place to be.
Meanwhile, I have to carry on investigating crimes because that’s the game I’m in—at least in the ‘real’ world where Breton and Robyn , my partner and I live...
And where I need to be right now.
And so I am, in front of the fire again on a rainy night.
I have a few case files spread out before me on the coffee table—the usual unusual—bloody canvases painted by demented minds.
I'm growing weary though. My job is distasteful as working in a slaughterhouse, except the animals I deal with are the bipedal type who lurk in the fringes and prey on the unsuspecting.
It’s given me a unique perspective of the human zoo—and the realization that the price of being sentient is a certain unavoidable pathology.
I'm living a nightmare.
Unfortunately, my monsters carve up people—but my pathology is cutting myself.
Isn’t that what I’m doing now—torturing myself for being absent in the past, oblivious to Faith’s mood swings, unable even to be present when she ended her life at twenty-nine?
The room darkens as if in a brownout, and I feel myself sliding down the same slippery slope again.
“You’re punishing yourself, Martin—what happened was not your fault.”
She’s in the half-light of the doorway, leaning up against the doorframe, as if wearied by these interminable conversations.
“I need you, Faith—I can’t go on.”
“You must—you’re tormenting yourself—and people need you. You can make a difference in others’ lives.”
“Whose lives,” I sneer, “these pathetic, twisted torsos, splayed out in grotesque poses—or my life, my half-life without you here?”
“Do you know why you try to black out drunk every night? Well, I’ll tell you—it’s the same reason lights dim when I come near.”
I chuckle bitterly, “Yeah, and what reason is that?”
She gives me such a sad, forlorn look that it draws the soul right out of me.
“I can’t do your thinking for you," she says.
“Funny, Breton said almost the same thing this afternoon.”
“Did he?” she smiles, “That’s because he knows it’s got to do with need.”
A jagged arm of lightning draws my eyes to the window. I catch a glimpse of a lightning flare illumining some obscure geography of cloud.
But when I turn back, she’s gone.
The room feels hollow and empty.
I sit alone in what once was our front room as tear trails stain my cheeks and rain shadows pattern the wall.
The night outside is forlorn, but not as desolate as the landscape within me...
a wasteland of real need.
Torn and conflicted—unable to move forward or back. I should have insisted with Breton— I really do need exorcism.
