The Happiest of Man

Chapter 31

He may as well envy those with their own experiences to hold and share with others with a large grin on their faces.

“Yeah, I’ve been there before”, they would say. “I know what it’s like to hurt like that.”

People like Izaya, though – he was incapable of empathizing. It was like he lacked the ability to do so because of his lack of experiences, or perhaps it was the way he handled said experiences as if they never did matter to him when in fact, he allowed them to shape him into the person he is today. Understanding is different from actually feeling it and he knew that. 

With that said, he never underwent anything traumatizing or life-changing. 

He just became the person he is today on his own, always seeking adventure with his life. Izaya Orihara just wanted to have fun, never inviting boredom as freely as he thought he would and although he enjoyed the freedom of a peaceful life that Shizuo Heiwajima had always dreamed of, he didn’t want it any longer once he had grown up and graduated from high school. He wanted excitement, trouble, and everything in between. 

Most of all, he just wanted to learn more about humans – what made them human, was he human? Questions that should have never been tampered with, but he wanted answers and he always gets what he wants (or so he had once believed).

Aware of his limits, he somehow clouded his mind with thoughts of his nonexistent immortality, boosting his ego as if he knew what he was doing when he got himself into hazardous situations not even a person with some sense would get themselves into. 

‘It was fun while it lasted’, he would think to himself before moving on to his next play thing.

So, as he went through his closet, there wasn’t a single family photograph nor was there a single album present. Those ordinary memories were somehow useless to the person he was yesterday, so he never kept them close. Possessions were useless – money wasn’t all that important although yes, he was greedy, but it wasn’t what he wanted. 

Digging deeper into his closet, making sure to move his clothes out of the way before doing so, all he found were clothes and boxes filled with documents and books that he never will read again.

‘I should shred these while I have the time’, he thought to himself, going through every piece of text typed on a once blank sheet of paper. With each box, he used his wheelchair to navigate his way out of the room and near the paper shredder that was in the living room with his computer desk. The rest of the documents, he hired someone to burn them all, leaving no traces behind of the shenanigans he pulled, the information he knew of those who once trusted him before.

As he watched paper become invalid, he thought it was almost like watching his own life deteriorating and he smiled because there were no words to explain how he felt inside.

Izaya reached into his pant pocket and held out his black cellphone. He told himself that he would deactivate it, but for some reason, he didn’t. There were no new messages (he had recently deleted everything because they were too old to get back to anyway) and he never thought he would find loneliness in the number zero.

He scanned his home, eyes landing right on Celty’s head. 

Izaya knew how to deal with the head, but it wasn’t time for him to discard it yet. He could either send it over to Celty or he could just dump it somewhere where it is guaranteed that no one will find it unless they scrutinized the area enough to do so. Obviously, he wasn’t kind enough to do the former, so it was the latter choice. He chuckled lightly at the thought as he felt nostalgia taking over him. It was Namie he held that secret with; the secret of a head in a jar that they kept in the crevice of a temporary living space that they shared during the day.

He caught himself wondering how she was doing as he immediately seized those thoughts. Deciding to keep himself busy, he went over to his desk, grabbed out his journal and decided to write.