Oh Lord, I fear, Love is Violence.

“I can see it now,” were her last words.

I feel me shaking, shivering; clutching my heart in a grip that will surely bruise. I feel my breath coming out in ragged, pained and broken whispers gasping as the agony threatens to cut out my already uneven breathing completely. I double over, cold sweat falling from my scrunched forehead. The last thing I remember is her numb, defeated face, her last words zeroing in on me from all directions, as the world blacks out for what I hope is eternal.

“Why, why did you?” She shouts, grasping my collar with her frail wrists and silent tears coursing her pale face. “I trusted you. Even when they told me not too. I trusted you. And I wish I hadn’t,” she says, with such finality that it cracks me in half, cuts out my soul in two even pieces: died hope and fallen love.

“Sir, sir!” an anxious voice breaks me out of my nightmare. I am shaking uncontrollably, my breathing unstable. Tears distort my vision and I’m thankful. Thankful to be shielded from this world I never want to face again. “Sir, her funeral is in an hour,” my personal secretary’s voice betrays no emotion, much unlike me, where the words sear a hole in my heart which I know can never be undone.

My face is disposed of any remnants of tears; painted a perfect pale, by my makeup artists. A vain effort to save me from the resident hawks that eye my every movement. My face is devoid of any emotion as I join the procession. My composure indifferent and my attire impeccable. Nothing to match the sea of emotions halting my breath from time to time, deep inside.

Cameras and flashlights blind me from every direction as the priest steps forward and slides back the curtains shielding the coffin. The coffin is pure black with gold lining its edges; hung on a spotless white wall with matching white flowers surrounding it. And then he does it. Opens the coffin.

She looks as beautiful as ever. She wears on her slender figure, a black, flowy dress which covers all of her. Her lips are not pale like expected of a corpse, but instead the pretty subtle pink they always were. If I didn’t know better I’d mistake her for simply being asleep. To people afar, her smile might seem relaxed, gentle, satisfied even. But to the eye of a lover, it’s everything but that.

I can’t hold it in, I can’t keep up the act much longer but I know, if I shed a tear more than that expected from a casual friend, it’ll be the headlines tomorrow. But I can’t seem to care. All I want to do right now is cry myself a river and drown in it. My poise is giving up, my knees giving away. My collar suddenly feels too tight, suffocating me.

The flashback restarts.

I first met her during an interview for the personal secretary for me, the president’s son. She was perfect. Smart, poised, cunning and confident. After she left, my father dismissed all other interviewees.

After training for about two weeks, she finally joined me. I hardly acknowledged her existence then. I treated her like I was raised to treat people of her stature; like a bought slave.

My father, who the world acknowledged as ‘the humble, generous and down-to-the-earth president’ was a drug addict and domestic abuser. The violent bruises, on mine and my mother’s back are proof enough. He was careful never to leave a mark where it could be spotted. Other times when he was drunk enough to not care, it would later take hours to cover up my mother’s face with foundation to hide them.

It was after my father had had his regular session of tying me and then hitting me till I bruised red, when she came to me. Her eyes took in my wounds and the pain in my fragmented breaths. And she hugged me. For the seventeen years of my life, it was the first time I felt at peace. I felt at home.

I remember trying weakly to push her away, having never before had the luxury of such an embrace, but she held on, held on to me like she was a dying sea and I, the rain. So I let her.

The next day when my father came to hit me, she told him I was out due to an emergency meeting. I was right there, behind the curtain. She looked at me, and smiled. I felt anchored.

She was closer to me than anyone before her, but we both knew there was a line between us. A line we could never cross. She tried to but couldn't always avert my father from abusing me. So she settled for hugging me till the bruises felt shame.

But perhaps, in her sympathy for a broken, tortured child, she failed to realize my reality until it had her in a chokehold.

I was my father's assassin. A slave to hunt for those who stood in his way. To abolish them who dared to refute. 

She saw me. Saw me cut through the Minister's body seven times. She saw it all. And looked at me like everyone else did. With hatred. Something under the surface broke. Something, everything between us broke. Never to be built again.

What I thought was infallible was as mortal as any other. She tried. Tried to fabricate the hostile truth. Tried to get me to confess I hated what I did, that I was forced to.

But I couldn't lie. I didn't hate it. I loved it. It was the only time in my life when I was the one holding the dagger.

She asked, begged for a reason to forgive me. And I gave her none.

I was numb, a blocked sea. "You know, I heard it, heard it from everyone. But I believed none. For I trusted you," she whispered, her voice breaking. "I don't remember ever lying to you about my sanity, I don't remember painting myself innocent," I replied, cut too deep to be recovered. I had let myself hope, in vain it was, that someone would accept me for who I am. Someone who wouldn't try and change me. Someone who would realize violence was a drug I was forced to submit to. And now there was no turning back. I was intoxicated. Beyond control.

It was a fragile hope, one bound to splinter into fragments. We had been living on a fault line for way too long. We were star-crossed lovers. In a hue of painted red, I lost her to my father's bullet.

And with her life, I lost my soul.

My father's disappointed face was the last I saw before I shot him.

The funeral is almost over.

"Here, my love, follow me," a voice, a lifeline calls to me. I almost collapse, cold sweat taking over me. My breath tightens again. I follow her.

We were on the roof's top. Just over the edge. She looked at me. "Fear not my dear, do you not wish to be united eternally?" She whispers. My eyes fill and I follow her. Follow her over the roof and into my death.

But I halt, just before the last step to my demise. I touch her. And her face gives it all away.

"You...you're alive," I whisper.

And she pushes me.

Then holds my hand, stops my fall.

"A broken child, starved of affection, a drunken father, stupid and idiotic. Really, you two were easy targets," she laughs as he face twists into someone I don't recognize.

"Stupid child, I am EL, from the opposition," and she laughs again.

"What…what do you mean…no," I stutter, the height beneath me scaring me not a bit as compared to the words I know await.

"I was here to make you trust me, fasten a façade of love which, might I say, was easy to do, when you're as desperate for love as you are. I crafted it, as it was. I was wearing a bulletproof vest, my dear, so your father's bullet was nothing short of a child’s joke. And as I had expected, you shot him in a single moment of rebellion. For your 'lover'. It was all too easy really," she laughs and laughs and laughs till that is the only sound I know. “I need to get a raise,” she jokes.

"But I saw you, saw you in the coffin," my voice breaks. "It isn't hard to fake a dead boy, silly child. What you see right now is not me," and rips off her face, which is a mask.

I gasp. A woman seemingly in her near forties stares back at me and laughs.

The suddenness of it all spirals my already shaking head and I lose sight of reality. Only to be brought back to earth with the digging of her nails into my skin.

“Not everything that glitters is gold,” she says, close to my ears.

The world closes and opens, I die and live. And I can't help thinking, I would've died in peace without knowing. I would've died with love, in love.

In single moment on vulnerability, I see what strays behind her trained, stoic eyes. Pity.

But it’s gone as quick as it came.

"Bye, my little prince.”

“I can see it now,”

I whisper to her, to the world, to those after me,

“Why love is destruction.”

And I fall.