Cirque de Sentimentalité - YANDERE!DAZAI

SHIPWRECKS, CAST ASIDE FOR THE WORLD TO SEE

He takes you to the Armed Detective Agency dormitories, and by the time you have arrived, it is night time. Dazai tenderly undoes your shoes for you by the shoe cabinet, and peels off your socks, your jacket, and leaves you in your shirt and jeans in the half-light while he enters the kitchen to fix you and himself a cup of cold barley tea. You sit on his futon. You like the firm, clean feel of his futon.

"Why here?" You ask him. He comes out of the small kitchen with two glasses of amber liquid, setting them down on the low table. He takes a small sip of the drink. "Why your home?"

"Would you prefer I take you back to the circus?"

You shake your head silently. You take the glass off the table and drink its content until the glass is half empty. Or was it half full? You've always been a pessimist. So half empty it is.

Even though all he has in his fridge is a litre of cold barley tea and imitation crab meat and sake, it is enough for you to build a world with him when you are together with him. He takes trouble. He is kind. He gives you a napkin to wipe yourself off the barley tea when you spill some on your lap. He takes your hand in his. Kisses it, presses his lips against the corrugated bumps of your knuckles. He looks at you through thick lashes as he does so, half-lidded, as though drunk on the scent of your skin.

"You said earlier you were like an earthquake. Can you tell me more?"

"Sure," You watch him as he plays with your ring finger, as though imagining sliding a ring on the digit there. "What are earthquakes? Tectonic plates that get stuck and cause friction. There are two sides of me, two parts of me. Both are always fighting. I'm constantly going out of my mind. In my head, it's all in my head. I feel like static, like my outline is wavering. Friction and boom. Earthquake."

He then pulls you to his futon. You let him.

His futon. One and a half metres of safety.

His futon, where you don't have to explain. Where he doesn't give alternative things you could have done in the past. Where his eyes are deep and calm. In his bed there's his body and his desire.

He feels intimate. This is intimate. Your life raft. But if this is the life raft, what is the shipwreck?

You both are.

Differently disabled: his inability to escape the narrative, your fear of it. Your wounded lives take shelter here. Why can't you mend yourself? Why can't you save each other?

He gently presses you against his chest, where your cheek cushions his Adam's apple. One arm goes over the side of his body, bringing him closer, as though painted by Gustav Klimt, The Kiss. He runs his hand down your spine, his leg crossing yours.

"Happiness may be an illusion, but I'm willing to be tricked by you," Dazai whispers. His grip on you is soft but firm–handfuls of mine. He's marked his territory by being the first person ever to embrace you post-war, and your willingness has proved him an ex-madman, because he's got a crown now. "I'm willing to be hurt by you."

This night soaked bed.

"All of this is metaphor," You say, raising a hand. Dazai intertwines his hand with yours, lacing his long fingers with yours. A tangle of fingers over knuckles. "We're both lonely hands, in a sense. Just waiting for something to touch it back."

His grip on your hand tightens. "Remember my words? How it feels like we can understand each other? How there's a possibility? I was wrong. I don't understand you, after listening to you. But that makes me love you more."

"When did you come to that conclusion, that you loved me?" You murmur the word 'love'. After years of hard violence, you felt undeserving of such a privilege. And yet it is being offered to you in abundance now. How do you deal with it, how do you take it as it is?

"When I first saw you performing. I knew you were it. I knew you were destined to be free. All of you. More than that. There is a shape of you, locket-sized. The (first name) of my heart. My heart. Oh, my heart. And if you break my heart, it keeps beating. That's the strangeness of life."

"I think..." Your words have him hanging on a string, or a noose in his case, but it snaps just before he suffocates. "I think I like you."

He softly chuckles, the tender vibrations of his chest rumbling against you. "That's good enough for me."

In the dark, you hear no sound but his voice. Just the soft intonations of his voice, lulling you to fall asleep.

A gentle rain starts outside. Dazai watches the shadows of raindrops streak down his window and dot the tatami floors, the sound of running water like a siren's song. He has you in his arms, asleep, vulnerable. You trust him enough. 

Rain keeps falling.