(Ship)ping of Theseus

Sautéed Mushrooms with Butter: On the Unspoken Correlation Between a Fragmented Mind and the Ship of Theseus Paradox,with Particular Attention to Misreadings of The Sickness Unto Death and Inconclusive Notes on the Epicurean Paradox.”

The thick document rested on the desk of the Ultimate Analyst—an enormous stack of papers that the redhead was staring at with a grin from ear to ear. She sprayed it with perfume and tucked it inside a briefcase so she could show it tomorrow morning to thelove of her life: her neurologist.

She left her room and headed for the kitchen, where she began cooking a few blocks of curry for herself and her sister.

“Apple Vermont… my favorite.”

The bubbling curry and the soft tapping of water drops in the sink were the only things breaking the dense silence. The Analyst savored the tranquility of the house. Silence and solitude, so suffocating for most people, were delicious to her.

That tranquility was interrupted by incoming footsteps: soft but firm, the unmistakable walk of her sister returning from school.

Ryoko knew her sister would greet her, so she tilted her head slightly to the side, and right on cue, a butterfly knife embedded itself in the wall behind her.

“I’m glad to see you too, sis,” the analyst replied without turning around.

“I see you haven’t lost your reflexes.”

“Tell me. How was school?”

“Pretty good. I had accounting and history exams—I think I did really well.

Also, your neurologist came by to ask about you.”

Now shedidturn quickly.

“Really? My sweetheart asked about me? What did he say?”

“He said it’s strange you haven’t bothered him in a whole week. I told him you’ve been writing an essay.”

“It’s an essay with a special dedication. The only reason I didn’t rub my pussy on the cover because I was afraid of getting a paper cut.”

Her sister let out a nearly inaudible sigh; not of exhaustion; just the quiet resignation of someone who grew up with such a creature as her sibling.

“Ryoko… you really don’t have to say that while I’m eating.”

“You’re not eating yet. And besides, it’s the truth. A dedicated essay requires… structural intentionality. Semiotic affection. A small tactile stimulus that represents the essence of the recipient.”

Her sister watched her for a few seconds…

“Just wash your cooch really well if you’re going to do that.”

“Unlike yours, mine always smells like flowers,” Ryoko said with a smile; the kind of smile that always looked like it was one spark away from burning the house down.“I won´t actually do it. That would be cruel. He needs strength to get through the Kierkegaard section.”

“The same author he’s told you a thousand times you have misread?”

“The only correct way to read Kierkegaard is while suffering.”

The curry began to thicken; the steam rose with a sweet, spicy scent that made the kitchen feel smaller, warmer; almost… human. The redhead turned off the stove and set the spoon aside.

“Hey, Ryoko,” her sister said, approaching carefully, “does he… know this special dedication exists?”

“Not yet. But once he reads it, he’ll understand everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yes… everything I’m capable of when I think about him.”

The sentence hung in the air, mixing with the smell of apples. It wasn’t explicit, but when Ryoko Otonashi spoke frankly, she never was

She served the curry, placed a plate in front of her sister, and sat down, satisfied.

“So you’re seeing your neurologist tomorrow?” her sister asked, stirring her food.

“First thing in the morning. I want the essay to still smell like perfume when he opens it.And I want to see his face when he gets to page sixty.”

“What’s on page sixty?”

The analyst lifted her gaze, eyes bright and completely serious.

“An empirical demonstration of the Epicurean paradox applied to affective neurosensoriality.”

That night, Ryoko kept thinking about her essay. She felt something… Between her anhedonia and her thirst for knowledge, something made her feel full... Maybe the uncertainty of what was coming. She was about to present her work to the one human being she couldn’t decipher, the only one who stimulated her brain and made her roll around in bed wrestling with her thoughts.

That night she used her hands for more than writing.The frustration of encountering a mind so complex it escaped her analysis had her rutting like a bitch in heat. Her body trembled as she imagined her doctor with her, once again thinking of him pumping his seed deep inside her.

She felt a strange pressure in her lower belly, releasing muffled gasps as her small hands ran along her body.

Once she finished “hating” herself, she slept like a log.

The next morning, she was the first to wake up. Even her disciplined sister could take a break, it was Saturday, after all. So took a quick shower and, after getting ready and making herself pretty, set off for school…

How silly, she had forgotten the briefcase with the essay. She opened the drawer of her nightstand and found the briefcase next tothe box.

She took a deep breath and picked it up. It wasn’t very big, but not tiny either. It had some scratches on the lid that read “do not open” in terrible handwriting and a drawing of a smiling teddy bear. She still didn’t understand why her “medicated self” made such acquisitions; she saw them as tools for a body language she didn’t speak.

She peeked inside, and as always… ended up disgusted.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the wide collection of anal plugs of different sizes, shapes, and materials, all unused, and the crown jewel: a golden piece with a real diamond at its base. She knew that her infantile, spontaneous counterpart used that box to express sexual frustrations, which she considered tremendously immature.

Vague memories came to her, more like flashes of irrationality than real recollection. A voice echoed in her head.

“I love when they admire my boobs, but I hate when they think they’re bigger than my brain.”

“I just can’t touch it, it´s dirty, grosses me out. I’ll poke my ass instead.”

“The doctor told me again he’s seen progress in me, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything. I want him to choke me, make me bleed, make it hurt.”

“That faggot with white hair talked to me again. He thinks that just because he reads Spinoza he can talk to me. Wouldn’t be bad to peg him a little.”

“That shitty blonde is a disaster,” she muttered to herself.

She walked toward the school. On Saturdays there was no school transport—only the stragglers or losers in extracurriculars came on Saturdays. Passing one of the fields, she saw that once again the football boys had crucified her classmate Akane Oowari.

Why did they do it? Who knew—maybe it gave them luck before their matches.

“I hope someday they stop tying her down and use real nails; it’d be a good chance to see if I’d truly make a competent Longinus.”

She approached the medical building, and the wind seemed to suddenly grow colder. She slowed down and entered quietly; the always cheerful receptionist greeted her.

“Good morning, Ryoko. Here to see Doctor Matsuda?”

“As always.”

“Go right in. I’m not telling him. Go surprise him.”

“Thanks.”

Doctor Matsuda was gulping down breakfast in a rush. He’d been tense all week, thinking that at any moment the torment of his existence would walk through that door.

And so it was. Kicking the door open, the condemned one arrived.

“Ta Daaa! The one, the only, the incomparable Ryoko Otonashi the cutest analyst in the world and the owner of your morning jerk-offs!”

“Please take a seat, Ryoko,” he said with disinterest, and chugged his miso soup.

Once he finished it, he asked, “So, how has life treated you this week? I asked that freckled toothpick you call a sister, and she told me you’ve been writing something.”

“It’s been an excellent week, doc-kun. I even had time to watch TV, listen to music, and write a lot. I think I’ve memorizedCarmina Burana,” she said with a giggle.

“So tell me, what’d you write this time? Finally got Kierkegaard’s dick out of your mouth?”

“Oh please, Matsuda, don’t say that. The only cummies I want in my mouth are yours.”

He grimaced in disgust. “I’ll take that as a no…”He paused and looked at his patient. She was bouncing with excitement. “Come on, hand over the briefcase.”

Ryoko set it on the desk and opened it. The room began to smell of perfume: a cold, clean scent—iris, unmistakably. It wasn’t the smell of a student or a model; it smelled like a thesis.

“You perfumed your essay. How thoughtful. I was getting tired of them smelling like sweat and crotch.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“Whatever,” he said, grabbing the manuscript. “And how’s that little memory notebook? Starting to fit memories in that brain yet?”

“Yes! I can actually remember some things now. But I still struggle accessing the memories of my ‘medicated self.’”

“‘Medicated self’? Can you stop naming that? I don’t know when you got the idea that you become a whole different identity when the antipsychotic cocktail I give you dopes you, but it’s annoying.”

“What do you mean, ‘different identity’? My mind has always been fractured; you know that very well. That’s why you’re studying me!”

“I must admit that even though you’ve got that stupid face, it was pretty smart of you to use your attributes to build a career in modeling and fashion. I love seeing those big tits.”

“Doctor! I’m serious. I don’t even remember signing up for an agency or anything like that. The day I take your cocktail, suddenly I’m a blonde who, instead of swallowing her despair to turn it into something constructive, wants to turn it into a doctrine of destruction.

Personally, I think despair isn’t contagious; it’s personal. Because, as my dear Søren said, despair is about losing ONESELF.”

“And you think medicating yourself makes you lose yourself?”

“Only medicating myself? Junko lost Ryoko, and Ryoko lost Junko… Always. Every second of my existence I’m drowning in despair.”

“Hmmm,” the doctor sighed, writing in his notebook. “So tell me… This essay… why is the dedication so long?”

“Read it carefully, sweetie. It’s dedicated to you.”

“I see. Please tell me the blood you used to write my name came from your veins or arteries.”

“Of course it did. I’d never give you dead blood.”

He spent some time to read it, ocasionally staring at his patient.

“And all that stuff you say you feel when you think about me… why? I’ll ask directly—why thebreeding kink?” he said, barely surprised, writingUterine Furyand underlining it several times.

“Finally! I was getting tired of waiting for you to reach page 60, the last page of the dedication.”She took out a beret and a cigarette.

“I’m asking you not to smoke here…”

“Well, then I’ll pretend I am…”

“Look, doctor… the body reacts like an animal. The moment I walk into your office and smell your masculine essence, my insides tighten as if they’ve been waiting for you for centuries.

The uterus is a clumsy organ: it doesn’t understand anhedonia, it only throbs as if it knew you could leave me marked, pregnant, alive. The irony is perfect: I want you with the intensity of reproduction, but I don’t ‘love’ you. I can’t ‘love’. I don’t know what ‘love’ means. I always tell you I love you because you stimulate my brain, you make me think, break, and collapse under your complicated nature. Romantic love is alien to me.

The love in books and media ignores our real human nature—imperfect and full of defects. I, on the other hand, analyze everything. I’m too aware to ignore the traits of every being. That’s why I can’t love: because romantic love doesn’t exist for me, it never existed. It’s a biodegradable fiction designed so bodies will copulate and then fall apart. I know it. You know it. And yet, my body humiliates itself: it burns when I hear you speak, when you ignore me, when you only look at me as a cluster of symptoms. What an irony: the only time my uterus betrays me is for a man who doesn’t believe in children, or wives, or anything that isn’t brains.

And still, I admire you. You’re the only one who doesn’t understand me. The only one who doesn’t touch me. Everyone else is predictable, stripping me with their eyes; you, doctor, reduce me to graphs, symptoms, clinical data. You treat me like a floating brain, an interesting case. That infuriates me. That excites me. That condemns me.

My sister blushes for real, falls in love for real—simple and transparent like any ordinary human. And I… I just rationalize my illness. Even my other self, that medicated, vulgar doll, only thinks about sloppy kisses and anal sex as a distraction. None of us knows what love is. We split ourselves in two so we wouldn’t have to feel it.

If you ever gave in just a little—if you ever took me out to dinner or on a walk, or pretended to go on a date—I would ruin it.Iwould ruin it. I’d laugh in your face or stand you up. Because desire burns through me, but love slips through my fingers like water. That’s my tragedy: I’m an organism designed to reproduce, with a brain that only knows how to dissect itself.

And my reward, my punishment, is wanting someone who will never want me back.”

“You really are a simpleton, Otonashi. So many words just to say you want a creampie...

And stop saying you love me.”

“NO, NO, AND NO!

When I yell ‘I love you,’ I’m not lying. It’s not conventional love: it’s wanting to remain close to the only person who breaks my trance, the only one who forces me to think beyond my perpetual boredom. That’s all: I want to be near you because you’re the only crack in the prison of my mind. The only one who reminds me I’m not completely dead inside.”

“Ah. Thanks for clarifying.”

The analyst closed her eyes and let a single tear fall. “And yet… I want you. Not tenderly. Not sweetly. I want you in the brutal language of biology: to have you on top of me, birthing offspring I would never want. That’s the grotesque part: my body doesn’t understand that I already figured out the lie.”

The neurologist sighed and closed the document, after jotting down notes on the back.

“We have nothing else to talk about.

See you tomorrow, at my house. Bring your notebook. Wash that dog-mouth of yours and your filthy pussy. I don’t want any weird smells in my house.

Now go, I have a report to write.”

“Y-your house?”

“I need to talk to you seriously. Don’t arrive too early—I’m not feeding you dinner.”

“Understood.”

That night, Otonashi went to a liquor store. She is not old enough to buy alcohol, but getting a fake ID is not hard when you have Junko Enoshima’s contacts. Found something that caught her attention and took it home.

She entered shouting, “I’m home!”

Her sister came out to greet her, a bit worried.

“How did it go, Ryoko? Everything okay?”

“It went like always…” she huffed. “But look, I went to the store and brought something super-duper special,” she said, recovering her clumsy smile.

“Alcohol, right?”

“How did you know?! But this time I didn’t bring piss like beer or whiskey, I brought something that’ll actually get us cheerful,” she announced, pulling a bright green bottle from her bag.

“ABSINTHE?! That thing causes hallucinations, doesn’t it?”

“That’s a myth imperialists spread so people wouldn’t drink that delicious stuff. We have to try it. I even bought you a glass and a spoon.”

“Only because I’m in a good mood.”

The green glass turned milky with every drop of water.Ryoko watched the swirl as if a galaxy were dissolving inside the glass.Mukuro, on the other side of the table, held the bottle with her scar-covered hands.

“It looks like poison,” the mercenary said, barely above a whisper.“It is,” Ryoko answered. “Just… a more elegant kind.”

The liquid kept spinning. The scent of anise delighted the sisters.No one spoke.When the sugar finally dissolved, Ryoko raised the glass.

“Do you know why I like this?”

“Because it’s the liquor of pretentious artists like you?”

“Nah. Because it’s the only drink that reminds me I still have a body.That something in me can burn.”

The pale twin drank without hurry, her freckles glowing like gunpowder.

“And that’s enough for you?” Mukuro asked.

“No. But at least I don’t have to pretend love tastes any different.”

Mukuro let out a tiny laugh, a crack across the silence.“I thought you analyzed everything.”

“I did,” Ryoko replied. “I only found that lucidity is just another form of fever.”

For a moment, they looked at each other as if sharing a crime.Outside, the rain fell softly, and the lamp trembled over their shadows.Mukuro broke the quiet.

“…Even so, will you go see the doctor tomorrow?”Ryoko tilted the glass and let the last drop fall onto the tablecloth.

“Of course. It’s the only thing I know how to do: watch everything dissolve in front of me.”

She took her notes and scribbled for a moment before writing“Today I drank absinthe with my sister.”

Hours passed and they kept drinking late into the night — a depressing scene, two drunken teenagers at a lonely, poorly lit table, speaking about the darkest and most twisted things… And as always, Ryoko wouldn’t stop mentioning her favorite human in the whole world.

“Kierkegaard said despair is the sickness unto death,” she slurred with a smile that nearly took over her whole face. “That only those with a soul can suffer it… do you think that condemns me or absolves me?”

Mukuro looked at her without fully understanding, cheeks red from the alcohol.“I don’t know who you’re talking about, but if he’s dead, I’m sure he doesn’t care,” she muttered, laughing under her breath.

“Oh, but that’s the point,” Ryoko continued. “No one cares about me, not even myself. And yet here I am, pretending to be a person. I split between Ryoko and Junko, but neither of them feels anything. We’re just two names sharing the same nothing.”

Mukuro rested her head on the table, her gaze unfocused.“Then let her die. Get rid of her,” she said with a hoarse voice. “If Junko hurts you, kill her. I can show you how.”

Ryoko let out a laugh so soft it sounded like a sob.“Kill her? I’ve tried. Many times. But she keeps breathing inside me, like a cell refusing to undergo apoptosis.”

Mukuro grabbed her glass and threw it against the wall.“Then stop thinking and shoot! That’s what I do when something won’t let me sleep!”

Silence returned, thick and electric.Ryoko stood up unsteadily, picked up the broken glass and held it.“You’re a mercenary, sister… you kill to feel. I analyze so I don’t feel. We’re the same, but you found yourself a more honest costume.”

Mukuro smiled, half-lidded eyes softening, and for a second she looked like a proud child who had finally been understood.“Maybe that’s why I love you, sister.”

Ryoko leaned toward her and whispered, slurred:“You shouldn’t. I don’t know if what I feel for you counts as love.”

She dropped the shards, sat down, stared into nothingness for a moment, and collapsed asleep over the tablecloth.Through the shadows, Mukuro watched her sleep, unsure whether to cover her with a blanket or do the world a favor and put a bullet in her skull.

That night, Mukuro remembered something important , a moment from her adolescence that marked her for life… the only proof that her sister truly cared for her.

It happened in the park. They were fourteen or fifteen.

Junko had approached her with burning mood swings, rage tightening her throat as she yelled:

“I’m going to beat the shit out of you” probably trying to prove she meant it.

Mukuro still remembers how she looked at her: with pity, like a wounded animal that has no choice but to be put down.

There was a fight not too long, but not humiliating either. Just enough: no spectacle, only efficiency.

Junko fell. The blood tasted like iron and surprise.From the ground she could see Mukuro’s face: cold, small, unsmiling.

“What will you have when you can’t exploit your beauty anymore, and you can’t write?” Mukuro asked calmly.

Junko spat a little blood and thought of applause, spotlights. Of what she’d be without the skin that saved her now. She thought of the impossibility of turning nothing into wonder.And she answered with what felt like the greatest truth she’d ever said:

“I’ll have you, sister.”

Mukuro tilted her head as if listening to a child’s confession. There was no indulgence in her gesture, only the confirmation of something she’d been told before — something that now sounded almost boring.

“You always knew that, idiot,” she said, turning her back.

Junko remained on the ground, the warm blood sticking to her mouth, understanding something deeper than humiliation: that the verb to have, in her mouth, was a pact , not a sweet promise.

That same night, Dr. Matsuda was reviewing his reports when one in particular caught his attention.

On a sheet torn from a large-grid notebook, she had written the following:

“Yahweh and his Asherah.”

That’s what I read.Two names that once would’ve made me laugh, but today… something inside me tightened.Not because I believe in them (of course I don’t), but because I understand what it means to disappear from the canon.She, the companion of the singular god, fertility itself, erased as if she had never existed.

History repeats its cruelty with mathematical precision:the principle that engenders, reduced to an error;the complement of intellect, exiledbyintellect.

I am no goddess.Nor her reincarnation.But if such a fate exists, perhaps mine is the same: to think too much, until I become barren even to joy.

I wonder if Asherah also understood—too late—that her tragedy was loving a god who only knew how to create through negation.

“Fucking hell,” the neurologist growled. “And I find this right before I’m about to sleep with her?”

But that wasn’t all.Behind that page was a small essay.On the cover it read:“Asherah in My Womb: Clinical Notes on Expulsion, Desire, and Lucidity.”

Yasuke sat down, poured himself some tea, and prepared to read:

“I read today, by accident, about Asherah.

I didn’t read her as one reads mythology; I read her as anatomy.Two names: Yahweh and Asherah.One devoured the other.One prevailed, and the other was cast out of the canon, dispossessed, reduced to rumor.And suddenly, the past turned into an equation.

I don’t believe in gods.I’ve written that a thousand times in cold essays no one reads.But there are myths that function like models: if I trace their variables onto my own internal map, an unbearable symmetry appears.Asherah = fertility.Yahweh = law, monopoly.One produces; the other regulates.One dances; the other measures.One kisses flesh; the other names it.

What startled me was how obvious it was: my body understands its ancestral role before my mind does.When Matsuda looks at me with the calm of someone who doesn’t ask too many questions, something in my womb—old, animal, absurdly insistent—starts working as if it recognized the archetype: he, the one who punishes and orders; I, the one who could complement but who simultaneously questions that complementarity until it wears thin.

I am not Asherah.I don’t believe myself a reincarnation of anything.I am (if I must use terms the world understands) a clinical case with a talent for irony.But that irony doesn’t silence the ghosts history leaves behind: being the erased complement, being the fragment of what was once sacred and is now exile.

And then I ask myself:What does a mind that has dissected love to death do when the body demands its own argument?I add it to a column in my notebook, mark it with a dot:“hypothesis: desire as archaic response to a regulatory figure.”

Kierkegaard spoke of despair as the sickness of the self.I reread him and find myself smiling, because for me despair is not merely a philosophical diagnosis: it is the logic that allows lucidity to stand.The more conscious you are (says the tradition I studied to feel safer), the more clearly you see the edges of the abyss.And seeing them is already hinting at the possibility of falling.

Consciousness is not a benign light;it is a spotlight that exposes everything.And by exposing it, it strips it of excuses.

I note:degree of consciousness ∝ intensity of despair.I write it as if it were a law: mathematics applied to grief.But laws don’t console.They only classify.

When I think of Asherah, I think of how patriarchy seeps beneath bodies even now, and how my analysis reveals everything without saving anything.When I say my body might function as a “complement” to someone like Matsuda (the word sounds both provocative and ridiculous, yet I keep it), it’s not that I want to lose agency.It’s actually a perverse experiment:Can a mind that understands everything surrender to impulse without analyzing it to death?That is the indecent question that makes me tremble at night.

There is a shame structured into that fantasy: obeying an impulse reason has already discredited.It humiliates me.It attracts me.It tortures me.It is a function that activates without permission, an ancient algorithm in my modern mind.

What terrifies me is not the possibility of feeling “love.”What terrifies me is that the act of feeling might reduce me to the mythical condition I despise:the one that exists only to nourish another.Asherah feeding Yahweh.Me feeding an order that believes it must tame multiplicity.

The final irony:studying the dynamic only sharpens desire.

Last night I dreamed of an altar made of letters.Each letter was a decision; each word I typed remained on the page with the firmness of a bone.I couldn’t erase.There was no undo.Using a typewriter has made me understand something essential: the past cannot be undone; words fix history, and I am left with errors tattooed as evidence.The machine does not allow regret.

I accept now, with a clarity that frightens me:to be Asherah (symbolically, obviously) is to be condemned to a form of recognition that does not survive modernity.And I, who take pills to modulate my states, who celebrate the equation where the explainable can be reduced, find myself ultimately in the condition of an exiled myth.Medicine tames me, but it doesn’t erase the substrate.I wake without catharsis.

Some days I imagine giving all this up and staying on the periphery: writing on napkins, eating curry in peace, accepting boredom as a form of quiet.But within hours the hunger returns, and it isn’t of the stomach:it is hunger for knowledge.To know what I feel, measure it, label it; observe the transmutation and turn it into a case study.Curiosity devours me, and despair is its acid.

What if my fate is that of an observer who cannot avoid being part of the experiment?I have to admit it softly:the idea of belonging to someone seduces me because it would mean, paradoxically,not having to choose.The freedom that forces me to think through every gesture frightens me.To be complementary is, practically speaking, a truce against perpetual reflection.

It sounds pathetic on the page.I know.But I write it because honesty is my dark religion: the truth stripped bare on the sheet.

All of this sounds like resignation.And yet I do not surrender.Not yet.Resignation would be admitting that despair has defeated me without my having tried.And I, who measure even my heartbeat, cannot offer capitulation without error rates and a control chart.

Maybe that’s why I write so much.Each entry is an experiment in containment:If I can name it, I can set boundaries.If I can measure it, I can predict its spread.If I can project it, maybe I can minimize the damage.But here is the cruelty:measurement does not prevent.Measurement merely documents the ruin.

Today, beside the typewriter, I looked at my hand holding the cigarette.My fingers looked like someone else’s hands: elegant, tiny, capable of caresses and of burning.I thought of Asherah again, and for a moment I saw her as a woman who understood too much and was exiled for it: exiled because her knowledge threatened the monopoly of the god.

I wonder if exile is the way the world denies what doesn’t fit its single narrative.

I have questions that offer no solutions:Am I the figure hated by the canon simply because I insist on asking?Is it fair that the price of lucidity is absolute solitude?Can joy arise when consciousness has learned so much it no longer recognizes it?

In the silence of my room the answer returns as habit:I keep writing.I keep reading myself.I keep experimenting on myself as if I were a laboratory, not a person.That is my curse and my tool.

I accept—without the makeup of irony for the first time—that I may be condemned to suffer.Not from masochism, not from theatrics, but because my internal structure made understanding its mode of life.And understanding is often a sentence.

Still, something resists:a small rebellion that refuses to call itself hope.It isn’t tenderness or faith; it is a minor gesture: making the curry Mukuro likes, leaving a warm teacup on the table, allowing myself one night where the typewriter turns off at two and I stay awake just to feel the street breathe.

Minutiae.Acts that seem useless but ultimately sustain a way of living.

If Asherah was expelled for the excess of her being, I choose, for now, to coexist with my excess of thinking and with my stomach that sometimes demands what I refuse to name.I will do it methodically, cautiously, without heroic flourishes.No one will save me.I expect no salvation.I write only to record what happens:a mind that refuses to stop dissecting its own heart.

And if I ever do become, at last, something resembling thewifeof a god, it will only be through the path of a greater irony: not as his docile counterpart, but as the witness who never surrendered her pencil.

I close the machine. The page stays marked. The ink, stubborn, inscribes its existence with the tenacity of a prehistoric insect trapped in amber. I stand up. I walk to the kitchen. I heat up some miso soup as if performing a minor rite that keeps a terribly fragile world from collapsing.

Mukuro will be back soon. Maybe I’ll give her the leftovers. Maybe she’ll pester me with banal questions. Maybe we’ll end up laughing about something meaningless while the universe, in its infinite stupidity, keeps pretending it has order.

Perhaps this is, after all, a clumsy—yet functional—form of redemption: small gestures that neither theology nor philosophy have ever managed to explain without becoming ridiculous.

-Otonashi-tan.

“Jeez, so much words... just to say she wants to get laid.”