For more than three hundred years, I have known.  Known the one thing that I never expected, never thought possible, and never bothered to hope for.  

It was in the final years of the seventeenth century, that I met him.  My Eric.  With quiet patience, he listened to me as no one ever had.  He also made it clear when he didn't agree with the things that he heard, but never once did he let those things come between us.   Even when he might have had more than enough reason to leave, he didn't.  

No one had ever cared for me enough to see past the exterior, to accept me, to love both the beast and the saint.  No one but Eric.  

And for no one but Eric, do I think I would have changed so much.  If he could listen silently as I spent hours, sometimes even nights, ranting over the virtues of a path that I no longer even had faith in, then I could listen too.  

I began to absorb his little lessons, began - for the first time - to see things from a perspective other than my own.  

For him, I learned to reign in that beast, though it never truly left me.  It lingered just beneath the surface, reappearing on occasion, when I could no longer hold it back.  Over the centuries, as these occasions began to grow more and more frequent, something changed.  For nights at a time, he would disappear, "wandering," as he called it, only to return when I was certain that he wouldn't.  Eventually the time came when I was right.  He was gone.   

That was nearly twenty years ago, and things have changed in that time as well.  Eric has come back to me, my constant companion once again.  But this time, I won't let him slip away from me.  

Eric's site