'He brought me flowers and walked me home. Three years later, he killed someone.'

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This article originally appeared on Sandra Stephenson's Substack, Rain in July. Sign up here.

"An obsession is a way for damaged people to damage themselves more." – Mark Barrowcliffe.

I once dated someone who became completely consumed with discarding people from his life, so much so that he eventually decided it wasn't enough. He had to discard them from the world.

And while he took the life of another man, I can't help but focus on the fact that he was kind.

We met in 2012.

I was 12. He was 13. Our relationship had no real foundation, existing solely because he asked me to be his girlfriend, and I said yes.

Despite our relationship's superficiality, he did more than most adult men.

He picked me up from class and held my hand. After school, he'd walk me to the back gate, ignoring friends who tried to pull him away, his reply being, "Let me drop her off, and then I'll be back." He brought me flowers on Valentine's Day and for band performances, trimming them from rose bushes he'd encounter on his walk to school. He opened doors for me. And every day after school, he'd text me to ask if I got home safely.

On the occasional cold day, he'd insist I leave my sweater in the car so he'd have a reason to give me his. It was one of the two sweaters he owned, a grey Jack Skellington hoodie that smelled like cheap Axe cologne.

If this was what Ted Bundy was like in middle school, I might have fallen for him too.

He was never home.

Outside of school, he spent most of his time at the local park, the hangout spot for crackheads and dropouts to smoke weed and indulge in hard drugs. Where gang members sold the illusion of "family" to broken children, opening a door to a world that should have remained shut.

His single mother never batted an eye, too overwhelmed with her own struggles to care if he ever came home. On most days, he didn't. Too scared to face her drugged-up boyfriend — the reason for his occasional black eye or broken bone. He preferred dirty clothes and other people's homes to what should have been his own.

He preferred other people's homes so much, that the day he killed someone, they didn't find him in his own. They found him holed up in someone else's, hiding away with what he should have become obsessed with discarding originally — the gun.

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Like any obsession, he started small.

Just how many insist they'll only have one cigarette — one year later, finding themselves chain-smoking their life away on a Monday morning with the shutters closed and a baby sleeping in the adjacent room. His obsession was the same. A slow spiral into losing himself.

His obsession with discarding people wasn't born out of malice, but of fear. He replaced others as a defence mechanism, a side effect of how his parents made him feel. He felt expendable. So when he got a taste of something good, he assumed it to be temporary — self-sabotaging in response.

So when he discarded me eight months later with no explanation at all, I wasn't surprised. By the next week, he had moved on to his next victim, a girl with tribulations of her own. At an age intended for self-discovery, she was letting older men discover her, desperately seeking the validation she could never get at home.

Like two wounded animals living in the same sanctuary, I thought they were destined to be. Until later on in the week when he discarded her too, leaving her sobbing during first-period P.E.

He dropped out of school shortly after in the Spring of 2014.

Setting us free had perhaps been the final ember of kindness remaining in a body on the verge of selling its soul.

The autumn of 2015.

A man was exiting his home, unaware of the eyes of rival gang members surveying his home.

As the man stepped closer to the street, his killer's car inched forward. The shell of my first boyfriend's body took aim. The driver hit the gas. And with the release of the trigger, he not only killed a man but wiped out the last ember of his own internal flame. The flame that once represented kindness, laid bare at the scene.

Despite the chaos that followed, the screeching tires, police sirens, and grief-stricken screams — lingering at the crime scene was the memory of a kind 13-year-old boy. Offering nothing more than a silent farewell to the 16-year-old murderer fleeing from the scene.

I often picture the adult version of him sitting in a cold jail cell that probably feels all too similar to his childhood home. Still, I can't bring myself to sympathise. He had been imprisoned long before the police found him that day — caught in a cycle that pulled him in and would never let go.

And yet, I can't help but think about the child who never went home but still knew to open doors and pick flowers. The child who discarded others out of fear they would leave, his eyes saying something different from what his lips dared to speak. The child who should have known love — not from me, or from her, but from the people who brought him into this world.

The people who taught him that other people's lives meant nothing, so he decided that's what they would be.

Feature image: Substack / sandramariaa