My Friend, Dante.

I met Dante about three years ago, under the strangest of circumstances. You see, I was resting after a heart surgery - and Dante came into the recovery room. He was no doctor - he wasn’t even a hospital worker. He was simply walking by outside, when he saw me and was drawn to me. “There was something about you to begin with,” he would later go on to say. “Some sort of a power, or lack thereof, that I felt I needed to be there to witness. However long it takes.”

The first thing I noticed about him was not his all-black attire, his many chains or his enormous eyebags. It was his crooked smile.

When Dante smiled, his chin pushed out, revealing his bottom teeth in a sort of twisted underbite. His jaw looked like it could snap any second. The corners of his mouth curled up, occupying nearly half of his entire face, and although his smile was most genuine, there were never any wrinkles by his eyes.

As for his laugh, it was a mere chuckle, sometimes amplified depending on the situation. I don’t think he ever did understand how humour works.

“Are you okay?” He said, as he walked into the room.

“Most definitely.” I responded. “And you are…”

“Dante.” He said. “Dante Fitz. And don’t lie to me.” He smiled - that crooked smile, both so filled with sentiment, yet lacking every common human emotion.

Dante was like something of a mirror for me, you see. We had the same values, but went about getting what we wanted in completely different ways. I believed in peace and forgiveness, and he believed in revenge. I believed in the goodness of man, and he believed in survival of the fittest.

“Talk to me about your heart.” He said. Weirdly enough, I was comfortable sharing the story with him - the story of why I was laying in a hospital bed. He listened to me with wide-open eyes, nodding and chuckling along the way. There was nothing remotely funny about my pathetic state. Nodding and chuckling were simply Dante’s ways of showing engagement in stories.

“Where do you come from?” I asked him. His accent led me to believe that he was not of Western upbringing.

“The East.” He said. “Where the wind blows and the Gerasene pigs sing with joy.”

I had no idea what that meant. I assumed it was just some pig farming place out in Europe or something. He always did speak in anecdotes with me. With other people, he said it as it was - and with a lack of remorse, a lack of common decency, or anything human at all. I was the only one that ever got to see Dante’s human side. Well, “human.”

After I told him the story, Dante became obsessed with me. Although he did not make a lot of direct contact, he was always there, whispering to me, secrets, advice, and filling my head with images. It was hard, keeping him in check. Dante was cruel if he was let loose.

Any minor disagreement I had with anyone, Dante would be there, telling me what to say. Sometimes I listened too - but that’s how I lost people. It’s how I lost friends for good.

Yes, Dante wanted to protect me. He also wanted me all to himself. He was possessive over me, as if it was up to him to keep me from ever getting harmed in any way. Having a guardian angel is nice - but when the guardian angel insists on harming others in order to protect your wellbeing, it becomes more of a burden.

“I’m not a burden.” He told me one night. Dante had just knocked out a security guard that kicked me out of the bar for drinking too much. I was going through something. He was always with me when hard times struck, as though my suffering was a magnet for him.

“Yo-u…” I said, trying not to slur my speech. “You are not human, Dante.”

“I could say the same thing about you.” He responded.

“You’re… evil!” I cried out.

“Oh, please.” He said. “You would be dead without me and you know it.”

“I’d rather be dead than DYIN’!” I said. “I am broken, D. YOU broke me.”

“I use my brain to think, boy. You use that stupid heart of yours - and you remember where that got you? It got you in a hospital bed, dying slowly. I am the one that came and rescued you, and you have the audacity to call ME a burden?”

“I used… I used to be a good man, Dante.” I said. “Look at me now. I am cold. Ice cold. Like an iceberg, ice cold. Or an ice sculpture.”

“Ice sculptures are beautiful.” He said, revealing his twisted smile.

“They break. I’m a broken ice sculpture.”

“Don’t even s-”

“Leave.” I said.

“I’m sorry?” Dante asked.

“Leave. I want to be good again. Leave, let me be. I want to have control again. I want to have control, I want to have control, I want to have control. LEAVE!”

Dante fled. Wherever he went, he was still with me - watching, waiting, for I was just as dependent on him as he was of me. He knew it would not be long until I let him come back.

About a year went by. It was a lot longer than Dante had expected, and just long enough for me to begin forgetting him. To begin forgetting his smile and his restless eyes. I was happy. I was in love with life, in love with the world, in love with a girl.

And before I knew it, I was back in the hospital bed, after another heart surgery.

Dante came in, as he had three years before.

“Talk to me about your heart.” He said. I smiled, and so did he. The smile that I’d forgotten. It was comforting, in a way.

So we spoke. And I told him about the past year - the highs and the lows, the leaving town, the fights with my family, the abandoning of my friends, the betrayal, and the breakup that ultimately broke me.

“What do you want me to do?” Dante asked.

“Whatever you want, D.”

I gave up control - the control that a year ago, I was crying for. I let myself go, and let Dante take over. He loved me, and was sworn to protect me by any means possible. So he killed - many, many people. He ruined the balance of families, and he passed on this sadness, this depression and solitude that engulfed me - he passed it on to people that had nothing to do with me. He did not care about anybody else but me. He wrecked reputations, relationships, and whole generations. Dante always held all the cards, and he had always been a master of revenge. There was error in his assumptions, however.

For you see, similarly to love, sadness regenerates - as does hatred, and as does every other feeling. So the more he took from me and passed it on to others, he would come back the next day and find that my condition was twice as severe as he had left it.

This did not phase him. Dante was hell-bent that his way was the only way to survive in a world like this. He was determined to crush the heads of anyone that dared to stand in my way, and he was ultimately determined to make everybody feel the way I felt.

And that is where the main error was. Because although his actions were somewhat justified, they were not the least bit fair. He was focused on making others feel pain, and not focused on making me feel happy. Dante had no concept of happiness. His sole purpose was to share misery; to drown those around me in the ever-flowing cascade of anguish that poured out from my broken heart. Letting Dante take over was one of the worst things I’ve ever done.

So I ended up losing more than I had to begin with. Dante made my brain his home, furnishing it with all kinds of broken bamboo chairs and knives sharp enough to cut a hair falling through the air.

I was finally released from the hospital. I went home, and turned on the bath water, letting it fill. It would be the first time I’d bathed in months.

I walked over to the sink, and turned the faucet on. I looked up at the mirror. There he was, with his twisted grin.

“Welcome home.” He said to me.

“Yeah.” I responded. “You sure made this place a whole lot more… you, huh?”

“What was I supposed to do? Everything you had would have reminded you of them… You know, the past year, all those mistakes - and not to mention her.”

“And what is everything I have now supposed to remind me of?” I asked.

“Me.” He said. There it was - that smile again. I can’t get that smile out of my fucking head, no matter how hard I try. And to think that there was a time I had almost forgotten it.

“Dante, I should not have let you have control.”

“What?” He was shocked. That was the first time I’d seen true emotion in his eyes. “Why the hell not? I kept you alive, didn’t I?”

“On the outside, maybe.” I said. “But look here.”

I dug my fingernails into my chest and reopened the wound where my heart was sewn up. It was black, and shriveled, like a smoker’s lungs.

“Jesus.” I said. Dante flinched. I never had the chance of a good look at it myself, until then.

“What do you want me to do?” Dante asked.

“I want you to kill yourself, D.” I said. “I want you gone for good.”

“But you’re nothing without me. What will you do?”

“I will suffer at my own discretion. Nobody else deserves this, Dante.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” He responded, crossing his arms.

“Dante, please, don’t make me do this.”

“Do what?” he asked. I took one of his masterfully sharpened knives and pressed it against his neck.

“You hate yourself too much to do that.” He responded with a smile.

“I hate myself just enough to do it.” I said. “And I hate you even more for it.”

“Go on then.” He began laughing - that amplified, deep chuckle.

I slit his throat and we fell into the bathtub, bleeding out into the warm water, turning it pink, and then red. Dante died by my side.

When I awoke, once again in a hospital bed, the nurse told me that I have been placed on suicide watch. That the wound I had left on my throat was a clear attempted suicide, and that I was lucky to have been found.

I waited a few days, waited for Dante to come waltzing into the recovery room again. But he never did. I had killed him. And although his legacy of pain remains as a prominent handprint on my life, on the life of those that I love, and on my neck, he was gone.

“All I have to do now is start rebuilding.” I thought.

I knew that I would end up in the recovery room many times more - but for what felt like the first time in forever, I felt my heart pumping blood through my veins again. The wound in my neck pulsated the rhythmic “dum-DUM, dum-DUM, dum-DUM.”

I am alive. I am free. I am alive.