Floating Like a Lilo ── Itadori Yuuji (✓)

24 GRIEVING A GHOST

TELL OF YOUR FRIENDS THAT I'M CRAZY AND DRIVE YOU MAD
THAT I'M SUCH A STALKER, A WATCHER, A PSYCHOPATH

maniac,
conan gray

     Reality is falsely perpetuated by the dreams of your past, a web of memories that fold over each other elegantly inside one's mind. Your mind. To say that you can tell the difference between right and wrong, life and death, Mother and Sukuna, would be a bold lie. You are slowly losing your sanity, bit by bit, like a drunk stumbling into a well, falling all the way down. It happens to you often, these moments of absolute madness, torn between wanting to be loved and hating yourself; you disappear but you always come back.

Although, you're never the same. I mean, how can you be?

Even now, in the clutch of another nightmare, your mind is bitter with all the things that torment you. When the world stops at your mercy, then it feels like you can see yourself split into two, as though you diverged from yourself when Mother died. You stand over your ten year old self and her eyes are hollow yet the tears seem so real, pearled and bleak as they slip down her cheeks. The irises are dead as if you were the one who died that day. Your hands are shaking and there are more hands, clawing at you and Mother, the limbs of curses.

"Wait! No! Stop!" You hear your thoughts but your lips don't part; what haunts your pale face instead is a washed-out ghost of a smile.

You put your hand over your heart, burying it deeper. If you could run away from this memory you would, because you know what happened that today; it's etched into your bones even if your brain tried to protect you by erasing it. The past isn't just time long gone. It runs deeper than the eye ─ it's a feeling.

The nightmare twists once more, a self-sabotage that is a sweet romance. It's as if you're telling yourself all the things you never would but wanted to through these dreams. You self-sabotage, destroy yourself before someone can get the knife. You push them away before they can leave you.

If you let them in, they'll just ruin you like last time. You thought you could be 'you' but there is no 'you'. Where did you go after she died? Did you run away, again? Because, you're just a puppet. Your strings tighten each day until veins bleed and the red slicks down your throat with bile.

And Mother controls you. You never did let yourself become free from her. Underneath the skin and bones and blood, you are made of bad decisions, irrationality and malfunctioning. You experience and yet, you still make the same mistakes. Behind the sadness of a parent, the mask to please her maker, lay a Mother that lacked a heart to give to her child, a ghost trapped under the thumb of a god. Simply put, you sympathised with her. How could you not?

In order for you to forgive the unforgivable, you repressed everything about yourself, redid yourself, blotted out the bad things and pretended your lips could quirk into a smile like nothing was ever wrong.

Your ten year old self turns, hair whipped against the wind, flesh painted in the shades of glory, stitched into the name of forsaken god; her eyes are so empty, though you stare into them forever, there is nothing inside them that an angel could fix. "Why did you do it?" She flattens the edge of her voice, holding it soft like a blanket. So why did the words strike into your heart brutally?

Junpei slouches next to her, "Why did you do it?"

You stumble, "D-do what?"

"Don't play dumb," Suddenly Mother sit ups, hands folded gracefully on her palms. Even her voice is delicate, like a flower teething in spring, a chirpy bloom, nothing that indicates the manifestation of darkness buried beneath a cracked soul. She picks out letters and threads them together. Her neck is stiff but she still turns it, evoking a chill down your spine; you can't meet her eyes, "We know what you did. It's only a matter of time before everyone finds out."