Emperor of Mayhem

s e v e n t y - t h r e e

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MONSTER OF MEN
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so sorry this came later <3

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When I was six, the company mom was working for, sent her to handle a project in their branch in Tokyo so we had to relocate to Japan for two years. 

In a strange though beautiful country, how could I possibly fit or blend in? I didn't speak their language, neither could I really enjoy much of their food. 

However, I enjoyed breaking my Taiyaki into halves and sharing it with the nice monk that always sat under the plum tree a few walks away from our apartment. The old man always told me weird things about the universe, or maybe they were just weird in my ears because I was too young and too naive to understand either of them.

He told me about universal equilibrium. How the world operated on balance. For the frigid hand that turned the clock of the universe to work without faults, balance must be enacted. 

To measure happiness, there must be sadness. To distinguish wealth, there must be poverty. To see the beauty of people, life  you must open your eyes to ugliness. To find kindness, you must brush shoulders with wickedness as you tread through life. The mouth that laughed must be ready to cry. Such was the rule of life. Such was the law of the universe. 

While I understood this later on, there was something he told me that I never cared to remember or think about until recently when I started to live through a whirlwind of chaos.

One day, I went outside to share my Taiyaki again. And as usual, he sat me down and told me things. But unlike other stories, this one irked me greatly;

'Child, they're going to hurt you. They're going to make you bleed. You will try to block out the pain. You will try to endure it over and over again. But you won't stop hurting, and neither will you stop bleeding. And the more you bleed, the more your soul gets tired, and the more it gets tired, the more you block out the world, and when you start blocking out the world, you will start to lose your conscience. And when your conscience is gone, tears of others will start to irritate you, emotions will shy away from you. You will become so cold, so stiff, so detached from humanity. And then gradually, you will lose yourself completely. And before you know it, you will become a monster, monster of men'

I was just a kid. I thought he was speaking gibberish. Mom did say he was a little bit unstable anyway. 

But maybe he wasn't an unstable after all. Maybe I met him then just because he had this message to pass to me. 

Now I was actually beginning to lose myself in the darkness which was slowly spreading through my head like a poison. The heaviness sat in my chest like a lump. It wouldn't go down, and I couldn't spit it out. Maybe if I cried it would reduce.  But I couldn't cry. There were hardly any tears left to shed.

 I was too tired to cry.

Too tired to feel.

"Shoot." 

I said, feeling the grass beneath me tickle my back through the material of my school shirt, my fingers interlaced over my chest as I adjusted on my back.