Even as the years pass, my past trespasses I have not yet forgotten. That which is understandable when one crosses a line, one never forgets it. Normally what fades, is the why. Everything happens for a reason, a crime of passion is a myth, and a coincidence is fate. I assume there is a reason why I have not yet forgotten my decent into madness, that sent me spiraling into the depths of my own personal hell, I just do not know it.

It all began when I was 19, the exact date eludes me, but nevertheless it is unimportant. I was in my second year of college, studying with a major in psychology. I lived a quiet, peaceful life. Working evenings and weekends at a local bowling alley, I earned just enough money to pay for schooling and a studio apart three blocks off campus.
The temptations of life had not yet caught up to me. At the age of 19, I had never smoked a cigarette, never engaged in sexual activity, in fact never had even had a girlfriend. It wasn't that I was overtly religious, actually I barely even believed in the lord. These were my own rules, I felt that if I should do something, then I would, there would be no thought provided, it would just happen.
What I wanted most of life though, besides being a psychologist, was love. To find love, to be loved. The very thought of love intrigued me, and I spent hours pondering its existence and meaning.
My best friend was the exact opposite of me. He drank, he smoked, he did drugs, and he had sex with various women, without any feelings of guilt or remorse. Ah Louis, I really miss him now, he truly was a free spirit.
Oh my, I just realized that I have not yet said my name, not that it is really required, once my exploits are written, you will know it. So let us leave it a mystery, and for the time being, I shall call myself Brad, I always wanted to be named Brad.
The days I spent in class, and the evenings and weekends I worked, any free time was spent studying, but not in the traditional sense. The only thing that intrigued me as much as love, or possibly more, was the human mind, and how the though process worked. My few free hours a week I would spend in a public place, studying the people who passed me by.
By the time I had met her, I was able to understand a person better than they could understand themselves. It was during one of these excursions into the mind that I met her, I was sitting at a bar, drinking a glass of water, and watching the people, when she bumped into me, and spilled my water onto my chest.
She was extremely apologetic, and offered to take me out for coffee the following night. This act was aggressive, yet desperate. Normally I would have declined, but when I looked into her big brown eyes, I felt her pain, and wanted to try and help her. So I agreed and as she had said, we met for the coffee.
She wasn't the most attractive of girls out there; she was what someone would call average, not ugly, and not quite beautiful. Her name was Linda. We became friends quickly, and through the ensuing months I found myself in love with her.
Even as I recall now, I still care a great deal for her, I still miss her; its just too bad things worked out the way they did.
As my love for her grew, she began dating a man she had met at the drugstore. Not wanting to wreck our friendship, and confuse the poor girl, I kept my feelings to myself.

As fate would have it, I was up one evening, reading a book on love, when she came bursting through the door, the tears already streaming down her pale face. Throwing my book aside, I ran and embraced her.
I held her until the tears turned into sobs and the sobs faded into soft sniffs of her nose. When even these had slowed, I quietly asked her what was wrong, and she suddenly began to cry again.
Choking out the words between ballets of tears, she told me her boyfriend had broken up with her, saying things that despite what I've done, I will not repeat here, in respect for my old love.
I slowly walked her over to my couch, and sat her down, and put my arm around her. Like that we sat for a full hour, her crying into my shoulder and me rocking her slowly back and forth, all the while rubbing her back.
When the tears subsided for what seemed like the final time, she lifted her head and looked at me, slowly she leaned her head forward and kissed me.
So shocked was I that I kissed her back, before I realized why she was kissing me. Quickly I stood up, as did she, with a confused look on her face.
"What's wrong?" her words still shaky from the tears past.
"That, that was wrong." I responded, my hands were shaking, and my knees trembling. She saw me shaking and came forward and embraced me. She had hugged me thousands of times throughout our friendship, but somehow, this was different. She looked at me again, and it seemed like she was going to try and kiss me.
Before she had the chance, I moved my head and placed my chin on the top of hers. Sighing I spoke, "I cannot do this. If you had any idea of how much I care about you, and how much it would mean to me, then maybe I could, but you don't. You haven't the slightest clue, you're in pain, and you want something, anything to make you feel better. And while I want to help you, that is the one thing I cannot do. This isn't real to you, as it is for me. If you want, you can stay here tonight, I'll sleep on the couch. I don't feel you should drive like this." Then without looking at her I turned and stepped onto my balcony and stared off into the night sky.

One day, a few weeks after that evening in my apartment, I saw Linda at a dog park, I was there, watching the people, and I saw her walking with a man. It wasn't her old boyfriend, as I had met the man myself, it was another, and they were holding hands. A sudden pain rose up within me, in the weeks following that night, she had called me once, only to ask me about a book she had heard about. The conversation had been brief and to the point.
The pain came from knowing a very simple thing; she didn't care about me, at least in the sense I had hoped for. Infuriated, I left the park as quickly as I could.

Once I reached my home, I found myself suddenly craving a cigarette, which was extremely odd for as I have told you, I've never smoked before. Even stranger, there were cigarettes in my home; Louis had left them here. I knew they were here, but I wasn't sure where. So I tore the house apart.

When the cigarettes were found, I used the matches I have to light candles, and lit one.
To most people this must seem really unimportant, but truly it is. I was beginning not to care anymore; slowly a cold hard stone was replacing my once warm heart.

Within the next weeks I began drinking, I also began doing drugs, all of this without Louis's notice. I began meeting random women in bars, and found out that my knowledge of the mind and my insight made them believe I could see into their souls. I began to become rather promiscuous.
I know what your thinking, there are millions of people like this all over the world, and this is true, but it's exactly three weeks after my viewing of Linda in the park that things truly turn wrong.
I was at a strip club, my intentions for being there were not to ogle the naked women, but in fact to find some cocaine. Asking around, I was directed into a back room, which happened to house a very powerful drug dealer. Who also happened to be my best friend Louis.
Upon seeing me he tried to explain himself, but I stopped him by throwing five hundred dollars on the table and telling him to give me ten grams of coke. At first he thought I was kidding, then when he saw I was serious, he laughed even harder. I asked him why he was laughing, and he responded by saying that five hundred would only buy me two grams. After the laughter died, I spoke.
There is no need to tell you what I said, because it can only be used for evil. Needless to say, he was angry, never before had I spoken to him like that, and never before had I seen right through him and spoken what he was on the inside. Without thinking he stood and reached for the pistol tucked into the belt of his pants.
As his hand grasped it, I spoke again, and continued to speak until he dropped the pistol, and fell onto the ground, screaming and crying. Moving quickly, so the bouncer from the front of the club wouldn't find me, I picked up his gun. Cocking the hammer, and pointing it at his face, a voice went off in my head. Calm and quiet, sounding like my long dead mother, who was killed by my father, who then ended his own life when I was seven, told me to stop what I was doing, and to look at myself.
Realizing what I had become, and what I was becoming, I slowly began to lower the gun. There was one last thing the voice said, it was this, and "you're breaking the rules." Throughout my life, I had obeyed rules, my own and everyone else's. Smiling with pleasure as my old self slowly faded away into the ethereal planes of time, I whispered into my crying friends face, "fuck the rules." And I shot him.
And so my new life began, I went on for weeks, killing anyone and everyone who happened to make me the slightest bit angry. The police didn't worry me; the one time an officer had questioned me, directly afterward he went crazy and killed seven of his colleagues.

The only other significant moment in my life was the last time I saw Linda. It was three months after my first murder, and there were at least six dozen other human being's blood staining my soul. I had came home from a particularly gruesome murder, where the blood was still dripping from my face, and she was there. She said she was worried about me, and she missed me. My response was to laugh in her face, and I spat blood upon her. Crying she tried to run to my door, but I stopped her, and threw her across the room. Her head contacted my coffee table, and she lay there, barely conscious.
I then picked her up and put her on the coffee table, and went into my room. I set to work finding two long pieces of two by four that made up part of a shelf. Carrying them, and three spikes I had used to kill a hobo, I went back to Linda, and nailed her to the makeshift cross. I then strung her up on my ceiling and left.
I haven't been back since, and it's been fifty years. I traveled around the world, creating pain and suffering wherever I ended up.
But now, as my death seems to be drawing closer, my appetite for death has waned, and the sound of my own breath bores me. So I'm writing this for absolutely no purpose, unless you want to see it as a suicide note, but truly it is not.
The poison I took is starting to take affect and my vision in blurred. And I want finish what I have to say.

Fuck the rules.