『My White Knight Syndrome.』
What joy is there in living, what sorrow in dying? When the agony of living outweighs one's courage and hope for the future, perhaps death is the best release. When someone takes their own life, people always say they just couldn't see a way through, so they left. But with so many sorrows and partings, so much bitterness and heartache in life, maybe she had actually come to terms with it, or maybe she hadn't. Either way, without exception, death was her release. People assume death snuffs out any future chance of things turning around, always believing that life will get better with time—but is that really true? There is so much in life we are completely powerless against. Others think it is merely temporary pain, but pain never truly vanishes. You never know whether what awaits you next is a warm embrace or a violent storm. She had no energy left to gamble. She was terrified of the storm's devastation, terrified of fleeting happiness, and she had grown used to being alone. She often stayed home by herself, unwilling to go out or socialize. At sixteen or seventeen, she never went to school; her youth was devoid of that lively bustle. With no friends in real life, she could only search for a faint sense of presence on the internet. She was not a good girl; she constantly wore a mask. The person everyone knew was gentle—perhaps that venomous side was only ever revealed to me, perhaps those vicious words were only ever directed at me. She always talked about her suffering, always felt she wasn't happy enough, but what even is happiness? She was full of grand, high-sounding words, yet never lived up to any of them; her actions never matched what she said. I never blamed her. She had suffered so many setbacks, and I didn't want to become another part of her pain. But only later did I realize that life hadn't wronged her, nor was fate overly cruel. While constantly longing for salvation, she repeatedly drained the people around her who genuinely cared for her. She threw her worst, most venomous, and spiteful side at the person who showed her the greatest tolerance, completely unwilling to invest a shred of sincerity into any relationship. I sympathized with her scars and tolerated her temper, not wanting to add another ounce of misery to her life—yet she was never some helpless, cornered victim, and suffering was never her shackles. She was the type to bully the weak while cowing to the strong, treating everyone differently. It wasn't that she didn't understand the weight of her vicious words; it was simply that they never fell on her. She couldn't learn empathy. She loved deflecting blame and looking out solely for herself, placing her own self-interest above all else. Blind to what others gave, she claimed she had overcome every hurdle alone for the sake of this relationship, endured all that pain, and made efforts for me. Yet none of her supposed sacrifices ever reached me; I received nothing. She hurled the most venomous words at me, yet claimed she could never bring herself to curse her past lover that way. She was an out-and-out fraud. Her photos were fake, the "forevers" she promised were fake, everything was fake—yet I never once doubted her. I could never understand why her sharp blade was always pointed at me. Even strangers received kindness from her, but I never did. Her words were cutting; she called me selfish. It baffled me—was I truly such a person? No one had ever described me that way before. I racked my brain wondering how I had wronged her, when I had given her everything she never gave to me. She always had death on her lips, constantly claiming she wasn't good enough. Yet the only person she truly cared about was herself, and never once in this relationship did she fault herself. At the end of the day, the only person she ever loved was herself. Perhaps she really had suffered unforgettable trauma in the past, but I didn't cause it, nor should I have had to bear it. That pain was never an excuse to hurt others at will, nor a justification to wear down someone's genuine heart. Later on, I gradually stopped understanding the "pain" she kept talking about. In every single incident, I was the one humiliated, I was the one taking the losses, and I was the one emotionally drained, while all she lost was a bit of courage. She didn't even offer me a shred of care when I was at my most humiliated. All she cared about was her own interests, wanting nothing more than to keep herself completely untouched. She magnified her own pain a thousandfold, and she would never be satisfied.