*
I begged for love with trembling hands, While cruel gods laughed from distant lands. No soul would stay, no heart was mine, So I drank sorrow like bitter wine.
The boy they broke is long since dead. His tears now crown the horns I wear instead. And though the darkness claimed my soul. It gave me power. And more love that I could ever hold.
*
I don’t remember the last time someone said my name with affection. Not because they wanted something from me. Not because they were being polite. Just because they were happy I existed.
Maybe it happened when I was a child. Maybe it never happened at all. At twenty-two years old, I honestly couldn’t tell anymore.
The city moved around me as I made my way home from work. Evening lights reflected across rain-soaked pavement while crowds drifted past in every direction — people laughing with friends, talking with family, holding hands with lovers. I watched them for a moment, the way you might watch something through glass, and then I kept walking. None of it had anything to do with me.
The thought should have hurt.
Instead, I felt strangely empty — and that was the frightening part. Not the loneliness. Not the sadness. The fact that I had lived with them for so long that they no longer felt unusual. They were simply part of me, like breathing, like hunger, like the exhaustion that settled into my bones after another meaningless shift at work. A bitter laugh escaped me as I shoved my hands deeper into my pockets.
Twenty-two years old. No family, no friends, no one waiting for me at home. Just a small apartment, instant noodles, and whatever novel or anime I could lose myself in before tomorrow arrived to demand the same things from me all over again. And the day after that. And the day after that.
My parents died when I was eight. Most people would probably expect me to say I missed them — I didn’t. My father used his fists whenever life frustrated him, and life frustrated him often. My mother spent most of her time pretending I didn’t exist. Food was never guaranteed. Kindness even less so. When they died, relief came far more easily than grief.
After that came the orphanage, then school, then work. Different places, different faces, the same loneliness settling over everything like weather. The same feeling that no matter how much I suffered, nobody saw it — or maybe they saw it and simply didn’t care. At some point I stopped wondering which answer was worse.
My thoughts drifted elsewhere as I walked, toward the stories waiting for me back home. Fantasy worlds. Magic. Adventure. People finding purpose, finding friendship, finding love. I used to imagine being reborn into another world — not because I wanted power, not because I wanted glory, but because I wanted what seemed to come so naturally to everyone else. Someone who would look at me and smile. Someone who would stay. Someone who would choose me.
A horn blared. Then another. Shouts erupted around me, and for a moment I didn’t understand why.
I glanced up.
The crosswalk stretched beneath my feet. The light was red. Headlights flooded my vision, and a truck was racing toward me. People were screaming, telling me to move, telling me to run — but I just stood there, watching. My reflection stared back at me from the windshield. Tired eyes. Vacant eyes. The eyes of a man who had spent his entire life waiting for something that never came.
Fear never arrived. Neither did regret. Only a quiet sadness.
So this is how it ends.
The thought drifted through me as metal rushed forward and the world began to disappear. Strangely, I felt at peace — because for the first time in a very long while, tomorrow wasn’t waiting for me.
Darkness swallowed everything.
And as it did, one final wish surfaced from somewhere deep inside my chest. The only wish I had ever truly carried.
In my next life…
I want to be loved.
To love, and be loved in return.