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"I want to spend all my time with you." "Don't make me leave you." "How are you dealing with everything? It's all being so terrible."
These are all absolutely normal things to hear in a day of being a host, something Haruhi still wasn't used to. Even though these ladies understood on some level that they'd have to leave and this wasn't appropriate behavior, it still didn't stop them.
"You get used to it." The others would say, "After all, they're just admiring you."
But it was more than that, it wasn't just admiration that they expressed. Haruhi knew admiration, but there was more to it than that.
They were desperate, hungry for something they'd never be able to do or have, and it wasn't even that they were truly kept away from it, but that they were playing into a role that they wanted to have, to truly experience but that they'd never try.
They wanted to be distracted from their lives. They wanted to be part of something else, something much, much smaller. Something that wouldn't change the world if they did, something that had no risks, only love and attention with no desires.
The host club gave them all that, or they believed it did.
But even that couldn't be given to them because this was all a sham.
"Don't you ever feel bad about it all?" she'd ask, but the other Hosts never had an answer for her—at least, not one that didn't feel polished to oblivion.
"We're just entertaining them." "No one's getting hurt." "It's just some harmless fun."
But was it really harmless fun? The way these girls threw themselves at the hosts didn't seem right, or proper, to use their own language against them.
"Why don't you like it?"
That wasn't something they'd ever asked; they knew why she didn't like it because she never went a day without making some comment about it. But if she were asked, she'd have a lot to say. She'd be more than ready to talk about how it was exploitive, how people didn't need to be given the facsimile of love and affection; they needed the real thing. They needed a real chance to relax. They didn't need to spend time mooning over the hosts; they needed to moon over someone for real and be mooned over in return.
All these damn rich people were characters of humanity because they never let themselves actually feel the things they needed to, worried about what others would think, what they'd feel, and how they'd act.
It wasn't fair to them to be locked into these little boxes like this.
It might sound like she was on the side of the rich people, but that wasn't it. She was on the side of being human, of actually getting your hands dirty when the time came.
She was on the side of really feeling your feelings and having them seen and acknowledged by others willing to share them with you.