𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐑𝐄𝐕𝐎𝐋𝐔𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐎𝐅 𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐘𝐋𝐀𝐌𝐁 | dazai osamu

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE REVOLUTION OF MARYLAMB
XX

He arrives faster than you think. Dazai takes a taxi there, sitting at the back seat with his elbow propped up by the window; staring mindlessly at the whirring colours of beige and green mixed together to a sterile brown. He sighs.

The elderly taxi driver looks over. "Romantic problems?"

Dazai smiles, politely. But there is an inkling of something else in his smile: concern. He cannot help but have you in his head; you've effectively turned him inside out, and swathed every facet of him like you were some sort of mustard gas, contaminating him. "Something like that."

"Ah, young love," He tuts, turning back to the road. Both of his gloved hands are on the steering wheel, carefully weaving through other cars and the road. "When I was a young lad, just like you, I was considered a womaniser."

That makes Dazai stop in his tracks. "Did you find someone to settle down with?" He asks, curiously. The taxi driver chuckles.

"After some time, I met my now-wife. She didn't want me; she was a believer in Shinto and I wasn't."

Dazai leans forwards, to listen more attentively.

"She was so faithful in her religion that I was considered a second choice. But I loved her, and didn't care; as long as I was even a choice, I was happy. And I still am."

"You don't care if she puts Shinto over you?" Dazai is shocked; if love doesn't burn him, doesn't squeeze his heart like a surgeon was trying to revive his heart, then he doesn't want it. He wants someone to look at him with human eyes and accept him full heartedly into their own. He wanted someone to give him a reason to turn his head away from the beloved, easy arms of suicide and give him a reason to keep going, despite the horror and inexorable despair of this world. He wanted love to the point of ruin; he wanted his fists to shake and his teeth to grit in effort at the sheer strength of the love. "You don't care?"

"Well, sometimes I do," The taxi driver admits, confesses, as if he hadn't been allowed to for a very long time. "But she loves me. She puts me in a place in her heart, and she views me with love as she does with Shinto. Sometimes I love her so much I fear her Gods will punish me for taking her away from them. And you; are you experiencing something similar?"

Dazai leans back. While there was a semblance of resemblance in the driver and his story, Dazai didn't want to disclose. To disclose meant that it would be out in the open, and your story is a sacred one, one that shouldn't be said out loud but wrapped in the mystical lines of oral folktales. One that should only be told when time has passed. That way, he can brush off all the difficult nature that is love and what he has done to the brushing strokes of history.

It was not that he was in love with you, but more so fell through you, like he was falling into a puddle that was actually six feet deep, coming out the other side with blood on his hands. Like love was a war: you and him never came back the same. Something has fundamentally changed him, like stone under the smoothing hands of tender rain. He loves you open handed and closed fist; he wants you carnally, like a beast slamming itself viciously against its cage bars, until the bars had permanently damaged his pelt into the shape of it. His heart beats for you, bewitched mind and soul; you are his first death, because when he sees you, he finds his identity begins to blur around the edges. He sees you in him, and he was sure you saw you in him. A mutual suffering: from suicidal despair to religious despair.

A bond that could only be felt.

He doesn't answer the taxi driver.

The port water laughs at him as the car speeds past the horizon of blue, rumbling and shaking as the engine roared. The sea is where air and light sinks into silence, and he thinks you are the air, the light, the wind, sinking into him, merging with him; no one else can reach him anymore but you, his depth too great for anyone else to understand and measure. The sun is so bright, and what gold light shines upon him cannot match the radiance of your presence, oh so holy in his arms when he had held you and kissed you in the art museum. He wants to bury himself in you. He wants to die in your arms, and he plays along with that idea because he knows you cannot kill him, but love him—it's all you know now. That has been your first death: The death of a God vacuumed him in.