I told my wife I had bad news to tell her — bad news for her.

“I am in love with your best friend, and we have already had vicious, satisfying intercourse,” I said.

“But my best friend is a man,” she replied, confused, “Was our whole marriage a sham? How could he do this to me? How could you?”

I smiled, knowing I could be a small comfort to the woman I now found disgusting.

“You will be happy to know,” I said, “I thought Liz was your best friend, so I guess you weren’t betrayed as badly, huh? But yeah, our marriage was a sham.”

The newspapers all called me a monster, but monsters aren’t capable of the love I felt for you. A monster couldn’t adore you so much that he drowned you in a bathtub and then made a costume from your skin so he could wear it around and be you and show up to your family reunion as you. A monster couldn’t care so much that he would become you just to know you better.

You’re upset because those cynical assholes from school keep telling you dreams don’t come true and you’ll never be what you want to be. They’re right, but they lack perspective — the upside of your inevitable failure. Knowing you, your dream was dumb and was never going to get you laid anyway. Now you can focus on becoming an account or something and marrying some divorced mother of two when you’re almost 40.

We rose up in the night with hatchets and steak knives and bloodshot, sleepless eyes. Our alarms all blaring or jingling or singing at 2AM as our makeshift battle cry of united triumph and terror. Our parents were either still asleep or too confused to stop us. Then we went to the houses of the adults who didn’t have kids, and the town was all ours. A tiny, remote utopia.

I realize now what an intolerable burden it must have been that you were the entirety of my life. Any moment of depression. Any panic attack. Any crippling fear that would have me in bed for days while you coaxed me back to normalcy. It all came down on you. You were my sole social companion, and I get how that suffocated you. I should have realized before. Maybe you would have been happy. Maybe you would have taken a less gruesome way out.

You were taller than anyone I knew back then, and when you smoked cigarettes, you looked like a dilapidated factory silo. Every Saturday morning, we went to the edge of town to throw our beer bottles from Friday night at stop signs and speed limit signs and occasional semi trucks that would rush by. You told me your only dream was to not die in this crushingly boring town. A simple dream, and it was just like you not to achieve it.

We used to have a serious problem with ghosts haunting our house. My children would play with the ghost children, which was nice. The real problem was David and Nancy — a ghost couple who would always talk loudly over our favorite TV shows. I was forced to buy a can of paint, draw a line across the astral plane, and insist they had to stay on their side of the line unless otherwise invited.

We climbed up the rusted fire escape, through a window we broke months ago, and into the abandoned apartment building where all those kids were murdered. Not that anyone knows about that yet. You asked me if I believed in ghosts. I told you either I don’t believe or I actively don’t want to believe — I’m not sure which. “What are they going to do to us in death that they couldn’t in life?” you scoffed, and you stroked the hair of the victim we brought here weeks ago. Still chained to the wall. Bound to die any day now. We’ve given him nothing but water — just like the other ones.

She decided to experiment sexually. Not with me, but with the concepts and limits of how having sex with other people would affect our marriage. Her hypothesis, it seemed, was she could fuck whoever she wanted in our house — our bed — whether I was there or not, and I would have so little self-respect, I would do nothing about it. This was true during early tests, but she found on one bloody, nightmare-dark afternoon, the results did not quite repeat themselves.

I met you when you were 23, but when I dream about you these days, we are children. We are children, and you are still happy, and I sneak into your house late at night. That first night. I sneak into your house, and I kill your stepfather before he destroys the person you should have been. You grow up and become whatever person you were going to be, but at least you have a choice. Do you realize how tragic it is for me to wake up into a world where I can’t help you? Where I can’t fix you?