My life is a contradiction
of sorrow and desire.
I drag my heart across the ash
To throw it on the fire.
Maybe there's a reason.
Could there be a plan?
Or are we all just fools
To think we understand?


~John Mellencamp



They think I didn't love you.

Fools.

Especially him. He was attractive. His silence and his suit gave him a mystique that make women fawn over him. I had no such luck.

I was ugly. I am ugly. I will always be ugly. Pale and thin. Hair eternally lank around my paper-white face.

Sometimes, my love, I thought you could see past the outer shell into me. Into the real Hojo. But I was mistaken.

I loved you first. You knew it. It made you uncomfortable around me.

(Your hands would shake when I looked at you.)

I wanted so badly to touch you.

(How could I touch you when you couldn't even stand my glance?)

So beautiful, so perfect, I didn't dare come near to you. I was patient. I knew, one day, you would see my love for you and you would find that love so beautiful that my face, my body, would not matter.

We worked side by side for years.

It took three hours to make myself look decent. I had waited three years to ask you to dinner. I was afraid, but finally, I found it in myself to ask. I thought, perhaps, you would go with me out of pity. Then, I would have something to hold on to. A memory. A memory to wake up to every morning. A memory to fall asleep with every night. A memory to love me and need me.

But when I walked into the room, you had already met him. You were bubbling with your love for him.

I excused myself to the bathroom and cried.

Do you think I cannot cry?

You met him once and I knew I had lost you. Truly lost you. Not in the measly fashion that he lost you which he mourns so dramatically for. But in a way he couldn't comprehend.

I had to watch, day by day, you drifting further and further away. You had been so near my grasp. So damned near that it gnawed at my insides. And then you were gone. As simply as that. All he had to do was exist.

I had to devise a way to make you mine.

You were so sad when you left him. I felt guilty. But I had to have you. He stole you away from me. Don't you understand? His love for you is nothing. I love you more than his child-like mind could ever dream of loving anything.

If you had given me one night. Not carnal pleasure, but a simple dinner. Holding of hands. A gentle kiss goodnight with the empty promise that it would not be the last.

I asked you if you think I cannot cry.

You're right.

I've evolved past that pathetic man I once was. I made you mine. You loved him.

But you were mine.