Must we continuously confess in order to be saved?

 
Must we vomit until we’re empty? To be forgiven, must we keep confessing until we run out of words? When we run out of words, must we rip open our chests and dig our hands into our hearts for every last confessable fragment?

I have no more words.

I no longer have the strength to speak on my own, so I beg you. Please dig your hands into my chest and take every last word. Am I allowed to say that it hurt? Am I allowed to say that I was sad? Such conventional words can no longer represent me. If I cry until my tears run dry, will you laugh and hold me? I can no longer express myself in words in front of you: I don’t know where my tears have gone; I don’t know what happened to my emotions.

 
Sinking to the bottom of my consciousness—

My heart alone falls into the darkness—...

What is there to reach out and grasp?

There is someone who compels confession.

 
I am there...

 
I’m not asking for much.

What I’m asking for is really something quite small.

Like cuddling close within the gentle fragrance of an osmanthus tree on an autumn night to talk endlessly about trivial, whimsical things. The morning glow of a strange city, the loveliness of a pure newborn breeze, the silence of the unpeopled hours... To share with each other all the things that are nostalgic and tender.

I feel my existence being filled to the brim just by being with you.

However much I tried, I couldn’t do it on my own. Though I feel as if I can never stand on my own unless I do something, there was nothing I could do. I want to be loved, but that’s probably a form of emotional dependence. I want you to need me and love me more and more without limit, in every respect and to the bitter end, and I want to cling to you and scream so much that I want to cry—you understand such weakness, don’t you? I am not ‘one person’. I can’t even reach ‘one’. Someone once told me that to face each other as one person to another is the way to happiness, but if I can’t become one person until I love myself under my own power, then the distance is too great for me to cross; I am the person who is furthest away from reaching that point.

I can’t love, Naoe. How do I love myself?

How do I learn to love someone like this, someone so helpless?

I can’t hate anyone else. There is no one I find more contemptible than myself, so I can’t even talk about hating anyone else. What do you think of me, when I know your reasons for leaving? You’re not me. You’re not really the one who should love me. I was trying to get you to love me as a substitute for me loving myself, because otherwise I couldn’t even exist. I wanted you to love me so desperately that I could taste it. So much that I want to cry, scream, beg, cling to you. I want you to fill me. Don’t leave me, I entreat with my whole body.

 
I can’t live if you won’t love me.

I need you to love me or I will die....

 
You were sacrificed. A tyrant who exploits love so badly must be punished, or it will never end. Someday there will be an insurrection. Revolution. A turning of the tide, a fall. I, who had taken it for granted like a spoiled child, not knowing that it was the mercy of Heaven, cannot aspire even to the level of a criminal. God has given me too much of a reprieve from my sentence, and must now have run out of patience.

Teach me. —Even though it probably can’t be taught.

It is a sin not to love. To not love oneself is to extort it from someone else.

A sacrifice was necessary. I had to exploit love to survive.

Poor you...

You wasted four hundred years for me. You had everything taken from you; you were sucked dry. And though I knew your cheeks were pale from exhaustion, I could not allow you either emancipation or rebellion. All for my own survival.

I have to stop asking you for love so that you can achieve your true happiness.

I didn’t mean to dictate to you. It was never a big deal to me.

It was always me. I was always the one I wanted to overcome: myself alone.

“I no longer need you...”

—I have to say it, now.

 
I...love you, Naoe.

I wanted to heal your suffering.

Why, I wonder? I’ve been squeezing the life out of you, and now I know it’s the only thing that is true. No one has ever wanted you more than I do; no one will ever want you more than I do. Even a thousand years from now. Forever. That’s it. That’s the only thing—the one trifling thing—that I can say with anything like confidence.

Until the very last moment of my existence on this earth, that feeling will never change.