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Ryukai
Apologies (Words of a Madman)
Dear Rika,

Let me tell you something about…pain, my dear. It hurts. I'm aware you know this, but in a much more precise sense of the meaning… Pain… hurts… Not just you. Pain will hurt everyone around you. Pain resonates off of you. Pain isn't just needles poking into you, but those needles also point outward. Anyone near you will feel those needles. They will experience pain with you.
You experience my pain, Rika. I am so sorry for what I am. What I do to you every day. I can imagine what you are going through right now, and for that I am sorry. My entire body, soul and mind is sorry, my entire definition is the admittance of guilt. Apology. What I am to you, what I do to you, everything about me involving you is the exact definition of regret and guilt. Apology.
You introduced me to what happiness is. I never knew what it truly meant to be content until you came along, my dear Rika. You, your mother and I… Those were the best days of my life. Nothing will ever match the way I felt when I was with the both of you. I loved your mother. She was the first person I was in love with.
It's the most fantastic emotion to experience when it is experienced genuinely. Few people ever are given that opportunity, and for that, I believe that we are punished for this. It comes with a heavy cost.
Love can mend your life, but love can break your heart.
People will tell you that it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. They are wrong. They have no idea. Love is a crime. Love is a drug. You take this drug and you feel fantastic, but then love is taken away from you. Love doesn't wear off like a drug. It is just taken from you, and then you are sent to jail for possession of this drug. It is a prison, but a prison of your own mind. You are trapped. You cannot escape. The sentence is life. No probation, no parole. You stay there and never come out. At first your mind is a cozy, comfortable house. Free to leave and go as you choose. You can even let people in to visit.
But my mind is a prison, and I have seen horrible things in this prison. It is an atrocious place to be, and I cannot escape it. I didn't like it at first. It was excruciating. So… excruciating. I hated it there. It was just me and no one else. You don't want to be there so you just lay there while the pain eats away at you. You don't accept it.
Then you begin to accept it. You realize that you will never get out, and you start to try and make the best of it. Try to make this prison a nice place. Try to make it comfortable. But no matter how you try to furnish a prison, it's still a prison.
You feel like this new prison is a lie. You're not being honest with yourself. You tear the prison apart, you go crazy. You go insane.
I am insane.
After a while, you get tired of the insanity. You get tired of tearing apart your prison and you just go back to laying there, with the pain and exhaustion of the whole ordeal. Back to square one.
It is a vicious cycle. You feel guilty because you have just been doing nothing except recuperating, so you again try to accept what has happened. Make the prison comfortable.
But it doesn't work. You take off the mask and see the world for what it really is and it makes you go insane. You've taken the mask off, and you know for sure that it is all a lie to yourself. At times, you'll want to put the mask back on. Other times people will put that mask back on for you, but they have that mask on a string, and they will rip it right off of your face at any given moment. People will realize that they have this power after a while, and they will take this opportunity.
And just as they catch on, you catch on. You keep the mask off. You see the world for the way it really is, and not the way you want to see it. People want to see good, but the world isn't like that. You're back to acceptance. You still have that mask, but you never put it on. You never let anyone put it back on for you either.
But sometimes the pressure is too much. You have to. You just have to.
That's a mistake…
The cycle continues. It is a full circle and it will never stop, and just like a real prison, when the infrastructure collapses, the metal rusts, the walls crumble… you cannot fix it. No one else will fix it. You're trapped now in the debris. You don't even have the ability to pace that small prison cell. All you have is thoughts. Yourself. And those thoughts are memories, and you think about what you used to have, what you used to do. Everything like that. You go insane from that. Permanently.
The funny thing is, with memories, they are things of the past, and when the past catches up to you, it screws with you even more. You feel love in the past, so in the future, if you feel it again, you'll know.
When you lose that love in the past and you lose it again in the future, the scars don't just come back. They keep adding onto the wounds that have already been afflicted. It all adds on. Eventually it becomes too much for anyone to handle. There are so many powerful emotions bring triggered from the pain and memories, so you do what you have to.
You get rid of the emotions. Emotions dictate what we as a person do. Without emotions, life is simple, yet we lose what has made us a person. With nothing to dictate your actions, you have no actions to take. This makes everything so much easier, but in the end, all it does is hurt you and the ones close to you.
With no actions, you just remain inactive. Your mind rots away. There are no actions, nothing to keep the mind from rotting. My mind is the most rotten thing in this universe. My mind is the most disgusting thing to even the man with the second most rotted mind in existence. More disgusting than whatever has happened to him to make his mind rot away like that.
That's pretty damn bad.
The funny thing in this case, is that memories are supposed to be a thing of the past. Memories are ideas and feelings that are results of physical things. But when memories manifest as physical things, it messes up the cycle of things.
You were a memory, something of the past. You were just an idea and a feeling after I searched decade upon decade for you, Rika.
But now you are a physical manifestation of my memory, Rika. I know it is you. It is not an illusion.
Don't think that I'm blaming you for this, Rika. I'm not. It isn't your fault.
I'm stuck in the debris of my prison, and all you can do is stand over me and look down at me, trapped and pathetic, and feel sorry for me. I am a burden for you, Rika, and I don't want to be.
You made me happy again, Rika. When I saw you after all this time, I felt happiness. It was an emotion, something that I hadn't had for a long time. It was a lot for my mind to take.
Again… Rika, you didn't do anything wrong. Don't blame yourself, and I'm not blaming you either.
You're helping me clear the debris, that's for sure… You're pulling me out of my prison. But those stones are heavy, and it will take a while, I know. I want you to forgive me. Forgive me for what I am, what I'm doing to you. I'm pathetic. I'm a sickening, saddening piece of scum.
I need your help so badly, Rika.
Please forgive me… tolerate what I am, and please help me.
Forgive me.
One day, I'll have enough room to pull myself out of this trap. I promise, I'll try. But some of the damage will be permanent. This has crippled me, but I will fight it. Not for me, but for you. I don't deserve the joy of fighting this crippling ailment for myself. But you deserve the joy. You deserve the happiness.
I don't want you to end up like me. Children, despite what their parents teach them, learn one thing from them, and it isn't anything that they teach their children. It's what not to be. The best parents are actually the worst parents… And as bad parents come, I think I'm pretty horrible.
I've showed you what not to be. I've done my job as a parent. Now I want to be your friend. You showed me happiness. Introduced the emotion to me. I want you to be close to me.
I love you, Rika.
I love you so much…
With guilt, sorrow and love…
Your Father