The days are filled with torture and at night I am haunted by unspeakable horror.

I used to believe that there is nothing left for me to feel, except for pain and fear, because that is the meaning of existence in this world. But I was mistaken. When I look at the girl now, I feel something beyond that.

It is a devastating sense of regret.

It is a feeling of loss and longing so deep and desperate that I cannot even begin to imagine what this grand and glorious thing must be that I am missing. But to know such loss must mean that I had something, once, even if I cannot remember what it is, or was. All I know is that it is no longer where it should be, and darkness took its place.

It gives me just a glimmer of hope that there is something beyond this world of  dread and misery. But hope is a treacherous thing, slow to blossom but quick to wither. And so I ask myself, again and again, if everything here is evil, what does that make me? And if she is at the heart of the darkest place in my mind, what does that make her?

Yet there is one thing I am certain of now. Something I remember.

She is the reason I am here. And I am the reason for her misery. This place is my punishment, and she is my sin.

And like life itself stays bound to death, my fate stays bound to hers, and we are bound to tragedy.