recently i have been tying up loose ends. i am fully aware how ridiculous it is to be writing to you like this now after all this time, but i can talk freely now and you’re all i have left. the world seems to have come to a standstill, and i suspect all this will be over soon enough. you will enjoy that, won’t you?
for once i have a lot to say, i guess. i’m not good with words and i don’t like to talk but i do seem to have a lot of experience writing you letters so one more won’t hurt. this may be long but you once asked me for the truth and so i’ll give it to you, as an apology for everything else.
i don’t know who i was when i wrote to you for the first time. i was unconscious most of the day and whenever i was awake i was in pain and would only be medicated if it was convenient. they told me to write a letter to a friend, and i thought it was to test my capacity for social interaction with others... to see if i was still human enough. i didn’t think you would be a real person. i didn’t even know who you were, i just knew you were about my age and that you would be excited to hear from me. even to this day i don’t know why they made me write the letters, but i know that there is something special about you that maybe i just won’t ever discover... or maybe, we were just lucky in some sick sense, and you were chosen randomly.
there is a lot to talk about, here. i’ll spare you the details of my everyday life but know that for the most part, in between surgeries, i was kept in a small, sterile room and monitored from outside. solitary confinement is awful, truly torturous, but your letters gave me hope, which was convenient considering the term was my namesake at the time.
my teachers and my doctors didn’t know what i was really writing for the longest time, but when they found out i knew immediately. the way they talked to me and the way they treated me changed, and it was like they were preparing for something. i predicted that this would happen eventually, which is why i asked you again and again to distance yourself from me, but i had hoped that we could write to each other forever. those who were unworthy of working on the hope cultivation plan, the dissenters and those who made mistakes, disappeared into thin air, never to be seen again. i wanted to warn you, komaeda. back then, the word of hope’s peak academy was law. if they wanted you gone, you would be dead within the hour.
i meant every word i said. i was more honest with you than i’ve ever been allowed to be with anything else in my life, and even when what i said was not true, i was still honest. i can’t help you pick apart the truth and the lies, because it doesn’t matter to me. i picked my words carefully to keep both you and myself safe.
you may have already guessed this, but it was true ultimate despair that came for me in the end. i didn’t want to leave. i had already given up, and i wanted to be left in there to rot and hopefully die. evidently that’s not what happened, and it won’t surprise you that it didn’t take long for enoshima to figure out what i was so upset about, and she sunk her teeth into me and wouldn’t let go. i didn’t even know what she was doing.
i have been honest with you before and i’ll try to be honest with you now... it doesn’t matter, it’s just words on a page and i don’t even know where you are these days so you’ll probably never read this. i wanted my suffering to end, and she made a lot of promises that she never kept. she told me that the only way to be free was to stop giving others the power to hurt me. i’ve been running from you ever since. i couldn’t go to you, because i was afraid of what would happen. i wanted you to forget me.
i don’t know where to go from here. there’s more i want to tell you but i pride myself on being succinct even when there’s no way to be succinct when talking about this. it has gone on for years, and i want it to be over, but i think to call you a mere loose end is disingenuous. i barely even know you, but you are the only one who has ever known me. maybe i’ll come back to this letter. maybe i’ll draft a new one, and summarise what i wanted to say in less words.
i did come back to it. it’s been a week. my heart hurts. i keep consider burning it but this has been the only time i’ve had the nerve to try to confront this. i’ll keep it for an unearned sense of humility. i hope we meet again, because maybe i can give this to you and you’ll understand that i have only ever been yours. i don’t know what it means to belong to someone, but perhaps you might. maybe you’ll keep me.
