The alcohol burned his throat as he chugged it down without a breath, and yet, Daoming Si felt absolutely nothing.
Feeling nothing was better than having his heart sliced into a million untraceable little pieces. Feeling nothing was better than torturing himself with the ghost of a future lost, was irrefutably better than obsessing over the maybes and what could have beens. Feeling nothing was better than accepting the fact that to the girl he loved with every atom of his being, he was all but invisible. Feeling nothing was better than realising that he was in fact nothing to her after all. Ah Si couldn't help but to mentally berate himself for being a disgrace to the Daoming name - he would wager that he wasn't even worthy to bear the title or prestige anymore. All those difficult, lonely years of his childhood, his mother had strictly trained him to harden himself against the world, to save face and avoid appearing weak by any means necessary, and it was all for naught. The rules, the regulations, even the patented heirloom poker face had all been carelessly tossed aside for one five foot two enigma who seemed to be hellbent on destroying him and all he stood for. Because of her, Daoming Si had broken the most sacred of the Daoming commandments and he was now reaping what he had sown. Pure, unrelenting agony was all he had to show for foolishly baring his soul. He was also certain that pure, unrelenting agony was what his mother would insist he deserved to feel for being so strong-headed and foolhardy.
I should have known better.... to love is to destroy.
The despondent heir didn't want to emote any longer if this was the reward - he felt trapped, pinned down in a opaque chrysalis of feeling that he couldn't escape from. Was loving her worth the heartache? No. Nothing was. He had to keep telling himself that she wasn't worth the raw blooded anguish. It was the only way he could possibly survive. She made him feel like he was clinging to the very edges of his rationality by practically the skin of his teeth, dangerously untethered and without viable means of evasion. She simply isn't worth it. At least that was what Ah Si was fiercely trying to convince himself. He wasn't bleeding slowly but surely to death because of her, the place where his heart used to reside nothing more than a hollow, gaping, painfully throbbing wound. It was pointless; he was far too shrewd even when half drunk, and he couldn't even deceive himself. How the mighty had fallen.
Ah Si couldn't even bring himself to think her name, let alone think about how she had dashed his heart into smithereens; it was crushing his heart into a blackened lump of coal, heavy and stony in his chest. The lovelorn heir shook his head furiously from side to side as he choked down another desperate swig of the liquid fire, drowning out the taste of the silken, petal pink lips that still stubbornly lingered in his memory. It was a curse sometimes to have such a quick, reliable mind; it wasn't realistic for him to forget each and every look she had grown his way and it certainly wasn't achievable to forget the tentative intimacy he had believed was burgeoning between them. Clearly it had all been in his imagination, and it was an exceedingly tough pill to swallow. She was nothing more than a deadly scorpion that had been disguised as an innocent rabbit; kissing her had been a memory that he had once treasured, but it was tainted now she had known the touch of another man. It should have been me. The notion drove into him sickeningly, like the blade of a sword, leaving Ah Si fractured and struggling to see clearly. All he could think about was how he yearned for her and how she had never once seen fit to give him the time of day. Her kiss had never been reserved for him. It had never been his to cherish in the first place.
It was useless; the memory of eyes deeper than a haunting forest lake swam unbidden through the Daoming heir's subconsciousness, piercing through him like a bittersweet Cupid's arrow. It killed him to think of her. It was also brutal to deliberately drown her out. It almost physically pained him just to exist, to know that the Tiny One had found solace in the arms of another. It was incredibly wrong, a crime against nature. It had cast a dark shadow over everything the youngest Daoming had considered pure and good in the desolate ruin of his farce of a life and he was struggling to fight his way back to normality. Ah Si wrung the bottle tightly in his hands as he considered his precarious position; he was aching in a way he had never even dreamed possible and for the first time in his life, he found himself fervently wishing upon a star to wake up the next morning as anyone but Daoming Si.
