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It was better to keep people a feather touch away. Just close enough so you could feel the residual warmth but not enough for an encompassing embrace. You wouldn’t allow yourself that, something all-consuming. You couldn’t lose control. You couldn’t afford to. The boat you were sailing had a set destination as indicated by Public Safety. You were nothing more, nothing less. Your body is a vessel for cold, collected calamity. It was a curved sword to strike down perilous devils that plagued this world. You would not consider yourself a guardian. You were no picture of benevolence. You are not a savior nor a saint. You are merely a teenage boy.
You wondered what it would be like to be ordinary. To be an actual teenage boy. Not the illusion of one that you concocted from gossamer and spider webs. You wondered what kind of a life you would lead. Would you have a lot of friends? Would you eat lunch in the courtyard with your gaggle of companions? Would you join a school club? Would you become president? You felt like you would be good at that. If you tried, you could put on a warm smile, one that is akin to a hearth. But your smiles never really met your eyes these days; they were puppeteer’s smile, one that you had formulated as you watched reruns of films on the television.
You liked films quite a lot. Your favorite was My Own Private Idaho . The friendship between Mike and Scott comforted you. You wished you had an unmistakable bond like the two men shared. You often dreamed of partaking in a long road trip to trek the world with a dear friend as you searched for the meaning of your life. Life was as fragile as butterfly wings, and you wanted to unfurl those wings and fly away. You saw pieces of yourself in Mike like the reflected shards of a mirror. Yearning as your beloved remained always out of reach.
You refused to keep any form of personal effect. Your time here on Earth was a fleeting puff of a cigarette, but you allowed yourself this. A worn copy of My Own Private Idaho that you rented from a DVD store. The man who sold it to you did not regard you much, but you were thankful for that. His mind drifted elsewhere, namely to the stack of pornography discs on the counter. It was quite crass of him to have them displayed full and center. However, part of you was in awe of him. To be so utterly himself and to not be beholden to what anyone thought.
You wished you could be like that. You told yourself you didn’t care about anyone and that you simply couldn’t afford that kind of luxury. But in the recesses of your heart, you held onto that selfish wish. You wished to be known. Just as a knife and flesh dance a waltz together — intimate and interwoven in the quilting of fraught connection. You so desperately yearned for that. Connection. Intimacy. Even if it was for just a moment. Candles burn bright and effervescent, but the sweet scent always lingers.
You satisfied your incessant cravings with parasocial relationships. It was better this way to never reveal yourself to another person. You created an image of another from fleeting glances and brief interludes into human connection. This one-sided fascination was preferable to you. In the end, you lost nothing but did not gain anything. If a relationship got dangerously close, you would hack away at it with an axe just as one would chop away at a proud tree. Splitting apart the wood and gazing at the hypnotizing rings. The rings in a tree represent growth and illustrate the longevity of a tree. It was something you would never possess. Longevity. Everything for you was utterly and wholly transient. So you attempted to trick yourself into satiating this parasocial relationship; it was supposedly a delectable meal. But it was burnt and not well-seasoned, leaving an unpleasant aftertaste in your mouth that you forced yourself to swallow.
Deceiving yourself was never your strong suit, for you had a penchant for honesty, not towards anyone else but towards yourself. You had a definitive sense of your own identity. It was clear and unyielding as a slab of stone. The missions and jobs you took often forced you to betray yourself and turn against your weak moral code. But in the end, you always knew who you were, and you bowed down to that stone as one would with a gravestone. It was a sign of your impending and fated death. You always knew what was in the cards for you. You did not need to consult an astrologer for this matter. You knew from a very young age that you were destined to die with your life cut short — the red ribbon of fate not much longer than a necklace.
That red ribbon of fate now hung against the weeping willow. It welcomed you home where you belonged, and just like you, the tree turned against the world, hidden behind a curtain of slender leaves. You took a hesitant step into the inviting loop. You cursed your lot in life. You were handed a bad hand of cards and lacked the charm to coast through the poker game that the world calls life. The world was unjust and bitter, and you wished you had been treated with a single semblance of kindness. All you did was obey orders like a dutiful soldier. Why must a soldier be punished for the wrongdoings of his higher-ups?
However, this conclusion was deserving, for you had committed egregious sins. You had betrayed the one you had loved the most—a boy bathed in golden light blessed by the gods. You gave him a Judas kiss and left him pinned to the cross.
You bowed your head down as if you were about to pray, but you knew no god would grant you benediction nor forgiveness. The oxygen in your lungs came to an abrupt halt, your neck snapped with a jarring crack, and your feet hung limply as you swayed in the wind.
Regret. That lingered in your heart as you were greeted by the cold hands of Death. She was kind and matronly. She held you in a loving embrace and whispered sweet affirmations in your ears. It had been so long since someone had treated you so tenderly. You wondered why you had ever asked Chainsaw Man to eat her, for she was the most remarkable woman you had ever encountered. You held onto this for as long as possible, clinging to life's dredges. However, she told you that you could not remain in this liminal space between living and dying. At some point, your soul had to move on. As you traversed the pane of life and death, you thought of Mary Magdalene. Her ethereality and the chaos that ravaged her. She remained in the center, threatened to be consumed by a black hole but never yielding. In many ways, she was just like you.
RIP
Hirofumi Yoshida
A few of your colleagues attended your funeral, and they uttered a hollow and impersonal eulogy at your service. They muttered amongst themselves during the reception, attempting to piece together a picture of you, but several pieces were missing, and they never bothered to find them. Not a single soul could recount a pleasant memory shared with you. You truly were nothing more than a fellow worker who dutifully completed his tasks and left room for little else. Thus, not a single tear fell for you.
No one had a single qualm regarding your life being claimed so early. Death was part of the script for a Public Safety employee—an inescapable and inevitable outcome. Just like a Shakespearean tragedy. To remain fixated on loss was a weakness that no one could afford. So your colleagues refused to linger and expectantly checked their watches, waiting for the funeral to come to an end. It was common practice for Public Safety employees to attend countless funerals. A funeral was as commonplace as a morning commute. Nothing to pay too much attention to as their thoughts drifted across the horizon.
They laid down your body to rest, and the easy smile on your face never dulled in its brilliance. No one had ever seen you this happy, not even when you were alive.
Your gravestone was a raindrop amongst a sea of other Public Safety gravestones. Not even a lone flower lay at the foot of your gravestone. In the end, your life was meaningless, one that did not gently touch a single soul and instead wreaked havoc on those that you cared about.
***
Hirofumi Yoshida. I have had my sight set on you for quite some time. It always pains me to claim life before it has fully blossomed. But that is merely my lot in life, just like yours. I collect, and I do not ask any questions. That is the nature of Death: never question and follow this endless cycle of life and death. All things must return to the ground from whence they came. You see, I understand, you little one. You were relegated to never question orders, just as I do.
But you were as naive as a newborn babe to think you could halt my descension. But I commend your commitment to your relentless goal. You were a doll playing house, not conceptualizing the grander scheme of things. How could you have understood the domain that I control?
I am not Mary Magdalene. I am God. I orchestrate this grand play. All pawns are behest to me, even if they wish to evade me. All will one day fall into my hands. That is the nature of this world. You exit your mother’s womb rosy-cheeked and wailing, and then eventually, you will lay on a bed of roses—no energy left to wail anymore.
But I will not show most the same kindness as I did to you, Hirofumi Yoshida. You were an interloper, and I have a soft spot for those like yourself. I am also an interloper. My dear sisters, whom I deeply love, wish to kill me and erase me from existence. But I will remain as I always have. I will not relent to the iron grip of the Chainsaw Devil. I bow to no false gods, for I am the one true God.
I do apologize. Your life’s work was for naught, but I do hope you can find some semblance of peace in your afterlife. You loved that boy, Denji, didn’t you? I will find the means to send him to you. You poor soul. You deserve a modicum of kindness that the world denied you, and I shall provide that to you.
***
A lone flower lay on your gravestone—a rose with deep crimson petals and papery green leaves. The rose remained frozen in time in a perpetual state of radiant beauty.
Your grave had few visitors save for a certain blonde-haired man with an eye patch who visited you from time to time. He would stand there with a far-away expression and chug a silver flask of some form of liquor. He would sit for hours drinking without a word, not a trace of emotion crossing his face.
He knew. He knew my little secret. But that old fool would never tell on me.
I am not as complex as many would claim. To most, death is an unknowable force that works in an utterly mysterious manner and has no regard for petty emotions. But I am remarkably simple, and I love deeply and brightly, like the shining sun.
Rest easy, dear.