Diabolically familiar

There are people who slip through your life like smoke, fading in the distance before they ever had the chance to settle. And then there are the others: the ones who linger. Who come not to stay, but to haunt.

He was one of the latter. A presence not easily forgotten, not easily understood. He had the kind of darkness that didn’t show up in shadows or storms, but in the quiet ways he unraveled you. Slowly. Methodically. Without a sound.

He never knew why he did it, so he said. As if that absolved him. As if destruction is any less cruel when it’s aimless. As if not having a reason made it less deliberate.

He returned every time I began to feel the weight lift. Every time the colors started shifting back into my cheeks. He could smell distance like wolves smell snow - far off, but threatening- and so he’d come back. With softness in his voice. With eyes that looked like they might finally see me. With apologies half-whispered and promises not quite made.

And I, tired and tangled in memory, would open the door just wide enough to listen.

But kindness, it seemed, was a thing he couldn’t stand. The moment I softened, the moment I dared to reach back - he turned. Razor-sharp. Blades tucked behind a smile. He would slice into the most fragile parts of me with terrifying precision. Words chosen not in haste but in hunger. As if the goal wasn’t to speak, but to wound.

I kept wondering: what kind of person does that? What kind of soul feels the pull to return, not to repair, but to reopen?

There was something near-diabolical in the repetition of it all. A ritual of cruelty. As if my pain was a thread he could tug whenever he felt himself disappearing from relevance. I had not called for him. Not wished. Not hoped. And yet he came. This year alone, month after month, like clockwork, he slipped through the cracks of my healing just to remind me he still could.

He whispered things like, “usually, things like that don’t bother me.” As if the trail of ruin behind him was just… collateral. A thing to be stepped over on his way out.

He was always like that. A master of almost. Of pretending to care just enough. But never truly holding the ache he caused. He didn’t tend to it. He studied it, perhaps, like one might a fire they started, fascinated by its glow but unwilling to put it out.

It took me far too long to realize: this wasn’t a broken boy trying to learn how to love. This was a man who knew exactly what he was doing and chose to do it anyway. Again. And again. And again.

Not because I was weak. But because he needed to feel strong. Not because I begged. But because I stopped.

He is not a misunderstood soul.

He is not a gentle heart buried beneath damage.

He is the storm that knocks gently first. The devil dressed in oversized innocence. A hunger disguised as charm.

And even now, I know - there may come a night when the wind will shift and I’ll hear his name echo in some forgotten hallway, knocking again. But then I’ll remember… he never belonged.

He only knew the architecture of my ruin.

And he liked it.

— Lux