Floating Like a Lilo ── Itadori Yuuji (✓)

26 REST IN PEACE

you're taking pictures you can't bear to lose
be the artist to my muse
i think dying is a beautiful thing to do
by your side

DYING IS A BEAUTIFUL THING TO DO, EASHA

You suppose Sukuna is unescapable. What stares agape, rolling out across your body like a rat's tail writhing in a cloth, is something horrid. Magic is a veil of evil and it chases you amongst your own emotions, unravelling the stitches that had closed-up the ghost breaking free from your own heart, birthed by someone that had been killed at your own hands. 

It is bright. A feeling that hangs against your tongue like the pointed edge of a pin, pricking you when you lull yourself into this state of complete, utter, meandering. You are drifting out across sea, not in peril and yet something had died within your eyes, bitter and alone against the rumble of something far greater than you. You hate this feeling of guilt — it is fighting to kill you.

Nothing could quite describe it and you imagine if you had to explain the way your body felt burdenless against the silhouette of unimaginable retributions, it would be impossible to even emulate a word. This is how it always is: feelings are like water; you can't contain it and yet it overspills and you'll watch your lungs fill up and splutter out the envy, the sadness, the anger. Is that how it is going? Something pearled against the web of your palms, stretching out like a blanket across you, only to cuddle your hatred close to your own heart, but for what...

Serpentine is the light — makeshift, hollow, twisted. What fills your vision is not brimming with luminous warmth but vicious glares and biting darkness, snapping at the hairs on your skin as your body aches for oblivion all over again. It feels much like you have been falling forever, cold air wrapping around your skin like a winter scarf, eyes searching for relief in the waves of ebony rolling over corpses. 

Corpses that rot amongst the flowers poking out behind ivory ribs and beating hearts on the ends of sticks and stalks, and you are in a garden of your own blood, rivets of cerise that pulse amongst overgrown weeds and itchy grass. And you've planted the head of her at the back with the rose bushes and you'll bury her where the flowers grow — and you'll wonder if you water it enough, will you finally love her like she did for you?

Are you dead? No, no. He would never kill you. You can feel the hiss of his arrogance graze your teeth, as if he, himself, is the one strangling you. You are fixed in a motion of existing that drives you back to the veil of dreamy wisps of utopia: the perfect life, the perfect parents, the perfect you.  Existence is enduring more than the consequences of living for those who do not; it is more than what you truly thought in the first place. To exist was just waiting for the inevitable. That snatch of death. Dying, especially to a curse, was an ugly fate. Your mother had been buried out there, on that hill, her body shriveling in the absence of love; the more you slowly start to understand. She died in the same way that one would grind a fly to its death when it lands on the window; you kill it because you can, because you want it to die, you no longer want it's existence... or maybe, you never wanted it in the first place. So why should you be born if you could never be free from death?

Maybe, just as the flames of a hot, white, hell violently rip across your spine, you will allow this fate. It is not about what you want — if the crazed mania of tangled sanity, a nest that settled in the wreckage of your childhood, wants out, then so be it. You are more than you, for you carry more than bones and blood, but gods and martyrs instead. You ought to lose this fight, let your soul flicker out as if it was some poor candle fighting the winter winds, and give away to the inevitable.

And then suddenly, your vision fixes itself like a pair of crooked glasses, burning, scorching, the bottom of your brain being the ashes after a fire. You blink, startled, staggering back and looking around.