I've been reading over what I said last time ever since I put it down on paper. I think I was too hard on my friend Elliot, but then it was my first outburst and it has been a long time coming.

He wasn't always so pathetic. Already this sounds harsh but he is, pathetic, compared to how he used to be. Years ago I didn't have to choose my words carefully when he talked about Susan. I didn't have to be woken up at two in morning when she came home with unexplainable marks on her neck that Elliot hadn't left himself. I didn't have to drive his woman home when I found her wasted at a bar and felt pity on my friend who was at home alone. Or maybe I was just trying to avoid the inevitable phone call I would have gotten about her not coming home that night.

She sat in passenger's side without her seatbelt and rocked from side to side whenever I made a turn. She was quiet as we drove through the main streets of the city, but once we got closer to her home she began to get restless. Her fingers curled and tangled her hair, her left shoulder had suddenly developed an itch that apparently wouldn't go away, and her lips, usually pouty, were being bitten raw. When I pulled up to her door she leant over and whispered things in my ear that I don't dare put into writing incase, by some odd chance, Elliot does get his hands on this.

It wasn't the first time she pulled something like that. Hell, it seems everytime that she has a drink in her and no one else is around that I have her to push her off me. I wonder sometimes if she's just self-destructive, or if she wants to test the sort of twisted love she has for Elliot by sleeping with whoever's closest. I've told him, but he always manages to find some excuse. He blames the drink, or himself, or me. The last time I bothered to say anything he only shrugged.

He wasn't always so pathetic. The last real good time we had together was about five years ago. I was twenty-two, he was twenty. I had known him for about two years and his problems with Susan hadn't started yet. Well, maybe that's not entirely true. It was like that first stage of an infectitious disease that shows no symptoms. David Black hadn't made himself known, but that doesn't mean he wasn't there, gnawing down the immunity of their new relationship.

Gatherings weren't the same after that. We still met and talked and drank like we always did but Black was always a spectral presence hovering over Elliot's head. I could see that he was both attracted and repulsed each time Susan smiled for no reason and tried to hide it from us. And I was disgusted by his inability to do anything but stick around for the ride. Even alone he got progressively worse until each conversation started with an hour long update about the 'situation' and closed with his daily conjecture of what was to come.

Five years ago, on my 22nd birthday, Elliot took me out to a paintball park on the outskirts of the city. It was a mild autumn day but it wasn't exactly comfortably hot, either. We had played a few times before and we strolled out to meet our opposing team as if we burst right out of a movie screen. We had all of the equipment the park provided strapped to us: goggles, paint-splattered overalls, and the gun itself with a fresh cylinder of gas locked into the top ready to launch little balls of paint wherever we pleased. There were eleven of us on each side. They grouped the people who were there for the day together, and those who were regulars on the other side. I remember the look Elliot gave me when we first saw them.

The image of a SWAT team comes to my mind first. They wore full helmets instead of the face goggles we had. Their clothes had not a single splatter on them and were overlapped with what I swear was body armour. I remember that clearly because I thought it was pointless, since it only takes one shot, no matter where, to knock you out of the game. And, besides, the paintballs didn't really hurt. Their guns were polished to the point that they shined. Elliot and I laughed about it until we heard them talking about how they owned all of this equipment and played several times a week.

Each instructor that I've listened to talk about paintball has always said the same thing about getting shot: when the ball breaks on contact, you'll feel it, and your out, but when the ball bounces off you, it'll hurt four times as much as you'll still be in. It only took us one round against these guys to realise that they were freezing their paintballs before each round so they would always bounce off and hurt ten times as much. It was like having pebbles propelled at you from a gas-powered chamber by a marksman that did this every other day.

We were black and blue when we got home. Elliot's back was covered in sickening welts and he bitched about it for weeks. My worst bruise came from repeated hits on my left shin. I limped for days, and it was great. I loved it.

He wasn't always so pathetic.