Prolog

So now you know, if you didn’t already, it was just bad timing.

A year later my next girlfriend, Vicky, took on the role I played in this tale, the battered fool, and I took on Heather’s – sociopath in search of a convenient victim. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that Vicky then took on the role in her next relationship, an endless series of falling dominoes.
Life often sucks that way.
In writing this book I had a hell of a time explaining what about Heather had me so wrapped up. I was wondering those following years why I was so desperate.
Sure, there was the mid-life-crisis-like condition of my emotional state.
Sure, I was lonely.
Sure, we had some great times together but why couldn’t I look back and enjoy thinking of the good times as much as I looked back and wished I was still with Heather?

It hit me driving down the road one day - she and I had more in common than I was ever willing to admit. All of the weaknesses I was struggling with I had seen in her. My fear of commitment, my intimacy phobia, my fascination with only the physical side of sex, my terror of opening up, my inability to communicate - they were all there in her. And I wanted to like that.
I wanted to love myself.
But Mr. Hyde needs a Dr. Jeckle, not another Hyde.

Heather made this puppet for me for my birthday sometime during this tale

"My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit."
Robert Louis Stevenson, from The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde

So she ran as far away as she could.
I stayed behind and learned to live with myself.