Prologue

"Why are you doing this to yourself? Why put yourself through all this pain and suffering if your just going to go and kill yourself?" He said.

She sighed. "Because I don't have a reason to live anymore! I have nothing...he took everything from me!"

He cupped her face in his hand, squeezing gently as he starred into her eyes. "You'll always have me! I'll teach you how to love yourself again. Until then, I'll love you enough for the both of us..."

*****

You never know where you're going, until you know where you've been.

Unfortunately, where I've been isn't something I want to determine my future. It's filled with pain and complete and utter misery.

Ever feel like, no matter how hard you try to forget your past, it just finds it's way back to you? You feel like you'll never escape it, and it'll always be with you in all of its painful glory.

Pain. You feel enough of it and you start to forget that anything else exists. The ironic thing about it is that, after only knowing that one feeling your whole life, you come to expect it everywhere you go — crave it even. Like some sick addiction, you can't imagine life without the pain you've felt for years. The pain that destroyed you and changed you in ways that you never thought possible.

You crave this pain because, well...you'd rather feel that than nothing at all. Nothing hurts more than emptiness.

I wish I didn't know what I was talking about, but I do.

But emptiness lies in the same bed with pain. They come hand in hand. After a while, you feel your body shut itself down because it can't take any more pain. Even one more ounce of pain, something small enough to hurt a butterfly, can knock you off your feet. Emptiness then becomes a way of life. A way to get by, day by day, so that the pain subsides...at least until your alone, then nothing can keep the pain at bay. It's an endless cycle though, and another addiction in itself.

Finally, after all that pain and emptiness, comes another feeling. One that is perhaps the worse of them all.

Hope. It hurts so much more because it's often false. It spreads throughout you, making false claims about a way out of all of the pain you feel. It breads like a disease, urging you to continue on in life so that one day you will find something worth living for again. It keeps you from giving up on life completely. No matter how hard you convince yourself that if you stop fighting then everything would simply be easier, it rises up inside of you again. All kinds of hope — hope for life, happiness, love. Every morning you wake up with this feeling of hope, only to feel it burn up in the fiery pits of your heart come the night. At that moment, everything comes crashing back again — all the memories, ones you wished you forgot.

Every day...Every night. When will the cycle end?

Here's where it began...