Chapter 114

CRYING PROLOGUE …I’ve always had this aspiration. Like, for my parents who loved me, the strangers who passed me by on the street, and even the people I wound up being friends with. There’s always been this aspiration for them, deep inside my heart. Kind of like the drive of someone who takes a girl suffering in the darkness and exposes her to the light again. Or someone who tosses a smile to a boy in some corner of the city, struggling under the unfairness of it all. Or someone who guides a friend who’s struck by despair, in the middle of an all-too-familiar story, and brings them closer to hope. I always wanted to be a perfect little icon like that. I could do nothing but put up with the violence; I couldn’t keep a safe place for myself; I cowered at the destinies people wove for me. And I wanted to change that. Right. That was what I wanted to do. Or it should have been. But this aspiration was a curse. That drive to become something became a panicked worry that I had to be something. I began to openly despise myself, this monster who couldn’t live up to the aspiration. I turned my eyes away from the ugly being I had become, envying others, falling into this bottomless pit… It was that kind of curse. Real monsters live at the bottom of that kind of darkness. Creatures that can’t love anyone, aren’t loved by anyone; things that just crave the unhappiness of others and the continuation of their own lives… It’s aspiration that creates those monsters. All this time, I’ve been hearing the voices of these monsters, dragging me in the opposite direction from my ideals, even as I reached out to those shining hopes of mine. I kept living under the motto that I, of all people, would never wind up like them. Just continually reaching out, from within that inky black void, wearing the skin of a human being… But I never noticed the light. Not until that hand I stretched out finally reached its desires. I found something I needed to keep safe. I had been weak, but now I had power. And I was blessed with friends who said they needed me. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t find the courage not to run away. And really, if I couldn’t obtain that, it was all for the better. When you take hold of an aspiration, all that waits on the other side is the desperate anxiety that you’ll lose it, along with a bottomless sort of emptiness. You tremble at the thought of how fleeting the person you want to protect is. You’re tormented by the heavy weight of being a friend. Is aspiration a curse? Is happiness poison? Is hope a sin? I didn’t know anymore. I couldn’t save her. I was already a monster.