Chapter Text
Mine has been a life of much shame, I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.
There are all kinds of unhappy people in the world.
The weak fear happiness itself. they can harm themselves on cotton wool. sometimes they are wounded even by happiness.
Though this is a very strange way to put it — the wound has gradually become dearer to me than my own flesh and blood, and I have thought its pain to be the emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur of affection.
The voice of a resistance weak but desperate spoke from somewhere in my heart.
But for God there is the antonym Satan, for salvation there is perdition, for love there is hate, for light there is darkness, for good, evil. Crime and prayer? Crime and repentance? Crime and confession? Crime and... no, they're all synonymous. What is the opposite of crime?
God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?
Is immaculate trustfulness after all a source of sin?
This woman did not say, 'I feel so unhappy' in so many words, but something like a silent current of misery an inch wide flowed over the surface of her body.
I could not believe in His love, only in His punishment.
"That's right. Wind that destroys the blossoms. It's the wind. The antonym of flower is wind."
Horiki at heart did not treat me like a full human being. He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.
I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.
It frightened me even that I had accepted a moment's kindness: I felt I had imposed horrible bonds on myself.
I felt like I wanted to drink till I drowned in it.
It was then I myself determined, this time as a reality, to kill myself.
I yearned with such desperation for "freedom" that I became weak and tearful.
That, as I recall, was her name, but the memory is too blurred for me to be sure: I am the sort of person who can forget even the name of the woman with whom he attempted suicide.