Read at your own discretion

I don't care. I'm going to write it. I'm sick and tired of holding things in, of bottling them up, and letting them eat at my soul like a cancerous thing of my own creation. I'm sorry if you're offended by this, but I can't hold it back any longer.

Ed Hoover was my best friend. I loved him more than anyone else in this world save my wife. I've been through some really good times with Ed. I've also experienced some pretty shitty times with Ed. We've had our differences. Still, he was my best friend and I loved him dearly. I still do. He's just not around for me to tell him.

He never deserved what he got in the end. Regardless of how he died (while there are those who believe that he took his life, I won't accept that as fact until I read the coroner's reports. Unfortunately I'm not next of kin, so I won't be reading them for quite some time.) the last two days of his life were the worst two days of his life. His wife of five months had left him two days before his death. He didn't know why she left him at first. She just left. He was confused. He was hurting. He was miserable. He loved her more than anything. She was his world. And she left him. Permanently. (The emphasis was hers in the email she sent out regarding the matter.)

In the past, I've hated his ex-girlfriends for the pain and the suffering that they've put him through. Rather than air any dirty laundry, I will simply write that the hell that he suffered at their hands, their mouths and their hearts was unconscionable and consistent. I hated them for that, but I forgave them as much as I could because he forgave them.

When I discovered that Ed and his widow had become something of a couple, I worried. I worried because I knew that his widow hadn't always been stable in her relationships in the past. I worried that she was going to break his heart. Of all of his girlfriends, though, I felt that she had the best chance of doing right by him. They were together for close to two years before they were married. It began to look like they were going to be okay. I still worried and no matter what I did, I couldn't shake that feeling. Instead of voicing that worry, I put it down as concern over Ed because of his past. While his widow's past had been rocky, it appeared that she had got over it.

He called me two days before he died to talk to me about his widow leaving him. He didn't know why. He sounded confused by all of it. Our conversation got interrupted. After a bit of phone tag, he told me that he had gone to bed and would call me the next day. He never made that call. I didn't call to check on him because I figured that they had begun resolving whatever was going on. The next thing I heard was that he was dead.

She betrayed him. After two and a half years of declaring her love for him, she shoved a blade into his heart and twisted. She made a sham of their marriage. She gave proof to the lie that she ever loved him. She did so maliciously. She gave him no warning. She saw what he went through with his ex-girlfriends and yet she went out of her way to prove herself the the worst of the lot.

Right now I want to take a baseball bat to something. I want to beat the everliving hell out of whatever it is until the baseball bat has become splinters in my bleeding hands. I want to run and run and run and keep on running until my heart and my lungs give out and I fall in a mass of gelatinous goop and I want to keep on running. I want to enact revenges biblical. I want to rain down lightning and smite the guilty. No woman scorned has felt the fury that I feel still, a month and a half after his death.

Instead I have kept my tongue as best I can in order to be civil to the woman that Ed loved. I have kept my tongue as best I can in order to keep from offending my friends. Others have forgiven her. I can not. I feel that she betrayed the love that Ed had for her more than anyone he's ever loved. I find her actions despicable. I have grown to hate this woman whom I once loved as a friend more than I've hated any human being.

Had Ed lived, things might have been different. I seriously doubt it, though. I've seen her work her magic before. Remember, I knew her track record before they got together. Regardless, had he lived they might have worked through the situation that she created. Unfortunately he didn't. That's what makes the situation so tragic.

So that's pretty much how I feel or as best I can put into words at this moment in time. I've been meaning to write something -- needing to write something, really -- for a while now, but my inclination towards civility kept hobbling my words. I saw something tonight that spurred my ire and I couldn't keep my feelings in any longer.