OUTCAST ── .✦ satosugu

01 BEING A CHILD IS NOT A SIN

What are you? To define is to limit.

Across gardened patterns of exotic wildflowers, under the scope of a night sky full of shooting stars, and standing over thousands of graves absorbed in the mud - scattered all over the globe, children are born at a pace so fast it conquers the blink of an eye.

They're born as a mist, the result of a love story, they share bits of themselves throughout time and space until there's nothing left of them. But no matter what they've achieved, in the end, these people are just fertilizing daffodils. We step over them every day, we build our houses on top of where a couple could've ended their lives hundreds of years ago, we put up museums where soldiers got buried in a hurry and never got to have a proper funeral. 

The beauty of living and seeing the world for the first time. The sea reflecting in your eyes and digging your feet in the sand to feel like the core of the earth is pulling you down, your ears ringing at the sound of your own laugh like a church bell.

The world used to be something dazzling, and confusing to read through. The air around you used to be crisp when it filled your lungs. Why do you think it is that the years of your life wore it down until it became common, draining, and eventually just a vast memory?

Well, in short, this cycle runs our lives.

There had been a click somewhere, beyond the surface of this recurrent scene, where the abstracts collided and a little boy was born.

This little boy, the kid who liked sodering by the lake and chasing snowflakes and birds, alerted the balance of the world at birth. 

There was an idea of this so person called Gojo Satoru, some kind of old tale, but there was no real him. And though you could shake his hand and feel his flesh gripping yours, he was simply not there.

Imagine you get a hold of the strength he was born with and run into the surreal realization that you could achieve anything if you want. Would there really a point to try anything anymore? 

This story runs deeper. 

Winters were furiously crisp and chilling to the bone in his hometown, somewhat close to Siberian winters. 

However, cold weather feels warmer when your hands are already freezing. 

He was born with this bitter sorrow inside him, a deteriorating state of emptiness, for dully not existing for your own sake but for others' greed.

Satoru liked winters best because it was so cold outside that the streets ran on deserted. No one was out, no one was there. Neither was him, even though his little boots crunched in the thick snow as he walked like a penguin, he thought, I'm done for the day, I helped the clan and did well at training - now it's time for me to rest, to not be anymore.

Summers were the nightmare season - not only was there excess training, but the village was crowded by more people than usual. He dreaded every morning and noon of those times.

The story runs even deeper.

The clan made him feel like a sort of god, of an angel, a saint, but simply living felt like his only source of sin. They called him The Honoured one, bowed before him at the entrance and exit of every corner of the house. They didn't even sing him a happy birthday using his real name. 

It all felt so feigned, like a pseudocode hiding that he was still a child, or somehow, this weird feeling that he was being exploited. 

Satoru was given the best education and training throughout his childhood years. He was living in his own dark illusion, like a cave far away from the rest. This isolation was planted into his mind since he had been born. Therefore, what conclusions could a child make in these circumstances? That ordinary people were nothing but livestock.

It is true, I suppose, that nobody finds it exactly pleasant to be criticized or shouted at, he thought, but I see in the face of the human being raging at me a wild animal in its true color, one more horrible than any lion, dragon or curse. People normally seem to be hiding this true nature, but an occasion will arise when anger makes them reveal in a flash human nature in all its horror. 

He told himself that and chased the moonlight like a dreamer, because the sunrise was too blinding in contrast with the punishment of catching just the dawn before the rest of the world.

Child of hearth, are you willing to wait for the world to cave enough of you so that you'll be fixed by the future and filled with light?