「Journal Excerpt」

I was an outcast.

In a world of crab mentality, my presence is an obstacle to everyone. A presence that stands in their way. My existence caused everyone to drag me down to the lowest low that I have no strength to carry on.

So I must rephrase my first line: I am an outcast.

And I have to wonder, why I am not unforgiving to those who had wronged and judged me. I never figured why I never feel any sort of remorse towards them in particular. Even I was raised as such and treated as such.

Perhaps... I'm just a lazy fart to also feel significant things such as feelings.

However, I am not silly. I'm not a person to cackle at drama or tragedy in life when it counts. And I'm not a person to find sentimentality behind the farce. Well, perhaps no one on this planet ever evokes such peculiar emotional responses. All except for one.

Because I wondered and imagined to myself what kind of a person is like to have such personality. Although fun, it gave me a moment of a tremendous headache.

In result, she's an 'outcast' too. Like me, her presence is a disturbance to everyone, just because she does things no one can't. Of course, what's given to me is what I can grasp.

Yet she isn't me. She's very strange. Stranger than I am. Watching her, she always stood against the absurdities in life with a smirk on her face. Always with a light mockery swirling on her determined eyes. When everyone dragged her down, she stood back up with an unearthly grace I have never seen. She had the gall to laugh while the world was against her.

And every time she did so, I always had that shudder on my neck. Feathers brushing against my skin from those extraordinary feats. A hard pumping muscle in my chest.

Her confidence is astounding—I realised—of which I do not have.

Suddenly, I had this sense of servitude. An inner calling. That I should protect her. Protect whatever she is. Whatever of her. Whatever makes her 'her'. I thought that will be all for my sense of purpose. I will be forever a shadow with less work to do. But my assumptions were wrong and circumstances had changed. Then something else surfaced.

I have a confession, my dearest friend.

I made a horrible mistake I don't regret. I do not know what I'd do if they involve you. I just know it a little too late what 'I'd do' when they did involve you. It was better for you not to know of it. It was my choice.

But if you, by sheer coincidence that you will undeniably grope for, learned about it...

Well, I am truly sorry. Because I am not sorry.