Hikikomori, n, (Japanese etymology): 1. A phenomenon whereby an individual becomes a recluse from a society, typically confining him- or herself to a house or a single room for a very long period of time.
2. A reclusive person of this kind.
nothing breeds nothing breeds nothing breeds nothing breeds nothing
Hid for a year. Thought I had won. Thought I was rid of Hyde. But he's been here all this time. In this room. In this head. Stronger than ever. All this time.
I'm dessicated. A half-man half-corpse entombed, to remember fading memories of another life. The years have gnawed away at what I was, and what's replacing the eaten pieces scares me. Rust and broken machinery and non-voids. Things that grind and twitch, and oh, the rust. I'm forgetting what it is to be a social creature. The facade is there, certainly but even that is crumbling and cracked now. My hands, you see, convey the paranoia and anxiety that my face refuses to. My hands, shaking and grasping for some escape rope that could deliver me from the oubliette of being half in a world of fulls. My hands, searching for a dagger to fend off innocent aggressors, but still only manages to strike it's holder in solitude.
I can smell the distant acridity of burned bridges stretching back through the miles and the years. The ones I have not set alight are decaying or have decayed due to neglect. They could have led me to Elysium, had I allowed myself to take them. But the envious, the inferior, the damned are not allowed to see paradise. I saw my failure reflected in their success, my un-life in their lives, and knew myself to be unworthy. So I turned away the hands that could have pulled me out and let myself sink. There's no bottom here. Every time I think I've hit the lowest of the murk, felt it fill my lungs and stomach and veins, filling me with more of it's poison - just when I thought I could sink no further, the bed gives way and I fall into darker sludge. And I know that if I go much further I will drown, and someone will find my bloated, waterlogged carcass lying in the middle of my room, my cell. And yet many have sunk much further than I and still managed to break the surface - but I can't help but wonder how many are floating dead above me.
And you know the worst thing? This stagnation, this isolation, this oblivion - I chose this, I chose it all. I gave up the lives I could have had for false duty, for second childhood, for phobos, for acedia, for the rust and the rot and the nothing. I nailed my own cross. I tied my own noose. I sealed my own tomb, and now that the weight of dirt closes me in, I can only lie in it.
I remember. I remember you all. I remember how you were, how we were. And I know how many of you are lost to me forever. And I fear how many more I'm going to lose.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
