1.92.3.A: Innocent/Realm of the Muse

So innocent, naive even, if only Erin had known what kind of a man I really was, she might have saved herself before it was too late, before I almost killed her. She wasn't the first though, she was just another in a long line who fell into the trap I was laying before them.  How funny that none of them ever noticed what I had become, or they didn't until I started to make mistakes, until I started to let my personal life overlap with my professional and that result very nearly cost me everything. 

I wish I could say that I regretted the mistakes I had made, but, I don't know that I do. I do know that I was looking to punish myself, the nameless sex, the alcohol, the fast living, that wasn't me, that was the stranger I was hiding behind. I needed to punish myself for the things I had done, the people I had hurt, or maybe it was more the things I thought I had done, and what better way to do that then by becoming the man most unlike who I really was.

I think back now on what I had become over those months after Abby and I broke up that first time we were together. Looking back on it now, and how I let Nicole take advantage of me, I think that became the real beginning of the end for things, though at the time I didn't see it for that.  I just needed to feel something, anything, even if it was for those few brief hours that someone like Valerie could provide, and when I failed with that, there was always a bottle I could crawl inside of.

If only my actions hadn't found ways to hurt so many others.  Why is it that no matter how hard I try to do the right thing that I always end up screwing things up?  Why is it, that it's always someone else who suffers for my mistakes? Erin, Rick, Patrique, Sakima, and even Chance, no one was safe from the harm that follows me, even in the Congo innocents suffered for my mistakes.

Why, if lives were to be taken, couldn't one have been mine? Why did I have to learn the lessons that would change me so late? I'll never have the answers to my questions anymore then I'll know how I found my way back from the dark place I'd lost myself in, but, that stranger inside me is no more, and at long last I can be sure no one else will pay the price for my mistakes.