“We had a dog at our house. Well, since we don’t anymore, I suppose it’s more accurate to say we used to. Anyway, we had a dog, and his name was Sven. He’d been with our family even before I was born, and his golden coat was just beautiful. It wasn’t only his looks, either. He had a beautiful personality too. He was so affectionate and loved people so much. While my parents were buried in work and my sister was always busy playing with her friends, he was the one who spent all that time with me. I cherished him as much as family, as much as a friend. I think Sven must have thought of me as family or a friend too.”

“Good grief. Another dog story?”

Before the bewildered retort could continue, Danyu cut him off.

“If I can become family or friends with a mere creature, what reason is there that you and I can’t do the same, Sio?”

The gaze fixed steadily on me left me momentarily speechless. To me, who had wished more desperately than anyone for your ruin. To me, who had mocked you more cruelly than anyone in order to bring about your downfall. You were now asking to become family, to become friends.

“How can you think that way? I, to you, for such a long time……”

Even the words that barely managed to slip out couldn’t find their end. Strangely, something in a corner of my chest surged, and I felt as though I might cry. Perhaps because of the fever that had taken hold of my body, my emotions had begun to run wild on their own. I bit down hard on my lip and tried to swallow back the tears threatening to spill, but it was no use. I raised my arm and pressed against my stinging eyes, and still it was no use.

“If the wounds Sio gave me had hurt beyond what I could bear, I could have simply left. That I stayed endlessly by Sio’s side and whispered of love regardless was entirely my own choice. So there’s no reason for you to feel sorry about my love from those days. The responsibility for my choices belongs solely to me.”

I had raged and screamed, blaming others for the loneliness I had brought upon myself, yet you drew into yourself even the wounds inflicted by others as your own responsibility. The softly flowing words lodged themselves in my chest one by one. They were words full of warmth, so why did they reach me as sharp and cutting as arrows, like a reproach? But before I could even think of the reason, my mind, dulled by the medicine, began to cloud over.

“I hate being alone with a passion. I was always surrounded by people, and I could never stand the moment I found myself alone. Perhaps that’s why I sometimes found myself troubled by the loneliness I saw in Sio. Of course, you said you were fine on your own, but being fine isn’t the same as being glad about it. Who in this world truly enjoys solitude?”

Even through the growing haze, Danyu’s faintly bitter voice reached me clearly.

It struck me as almost laughable that the loneliness I had wanted so desperately to hide had been seen through by none other than Danyu. It is difficult for anyone to lay bare their weaknesses before others, but I had been particularly unwilling to let Danyu see this loneliness. In truth, it wasn’t only the loneliness. My unhappiness, my twisted nature, my warped heart as well. In other words, I had wanted to conceal every fragile part of myself from you.

Not once had I ever stopped to wonder why. I had simply thought: if you see me as a brilliant genius, then I will remain that for you. At times laughing at you for loving a Sio Lieselotte who existed only in fantasy, at times resenting you for whispering of love yet failing to notice my loneliness. And so I had only waited for you, who loved a phantom that did not exist, to fall.

But then, what would happen after you fell?

The imagination always stopped there. Because whenever my thoughts reached that point, I felt as though I might cry, just as I did in this very moment.

“Don’t become a lonely person, Sio.”

Through the deepening haze of my fading consciousness, a small whisper reached me. It was a word with a beauty more lovely than any music in this world. As though I had fallen under a spell, I was drawn into the music that began from that beautiful whisper.

The opening is always a piano melody, but for this music, that alone was not enough. Clarinet and horn, contrabass. The sound of wind and string instruments woven together rings out slowly. Largo molto allegro. A terribly slow tone moves its steps in search of someone. Who is it that stands at the end of this path?

The footsteps begin to quicken. When the steps pass through allegretto and come to rest at adagio, all the instruments hold their breath and wait for the one who is to come. In the stillness of that waiting. The sound of a piano from somewhere far away. The wind and string instruments take up that sound and sing of joy. Brilliant color returns to a monochrome city, and the face of a person whose identity had been unknown grows clear.

Yes. It’s you. You were there.

Even seeing the face of the one I had longed so much to see, for some reason I feel not joy but sorrow, and I press my lips firmly shut. Because I know that no matter what words I might speak to you, you can never come to me. You are my longing, my illusion, and perhaps a presence that will never exist again in my life.

As I turn and watch your retreating figure growing distant, the music slows again. When the melody, quietly dying, reaches its end and scatters without a trace, the image of you who once stayed by my side is nowhere to be found. A dampness rises in the hollow of my chest.

What should I call this feeling, this heart of mine?

With that question, my eyes flew open. The fever that had wrapped around my body was gone entirely. I rose as I was and ran to the desk. Notes were drawn one by one onto the sheet music that had not been filled by even a single page until now. There was no hesitation in the moving hand. Only the thought that I had to set down even one more note before this music drifting through my mind disappeared was what moved my hand.

In an instant the sheet music passed two pages, then three, and by the time I had lost count of how many I had written, my hand stopped. Before my eyes, an already countless number of sheets had piled up in a heap. In the dim light of early dawn, notes lay scattered in disarray. I quietly reached out and ran my fingers over the notes scrawled like hasty scribbles. Through my fingertips, the feelings held within the sheet music came flooding in.

Is this my heart toward Danyu Astrid?

Emotions difficult to put into words slowly began to overtake my mind. Ten years since I first met you. With what kind of heart had I been looking at you?

A tear fell onto the sheet music. The notes began to bleed where the tear had fallen, yet I could not bring myself to move my hand. The falling tears felt unfamiliar, as though they did not belong to me. I stared blankly at them with the feeling of someone watching another person’s tears.

Before I knew it, the tears were pouring uncontrollably, soaking the sheet music. Had I ever cried this hard in my life? I had never cried under the merciless director’s beatings, nor under the cutting words of those who sneered at my lowly origins. I had not even cried this much when I was told I might never be able to use my hands again.

And yet, why are you doing this to me, what are you to me that I should be like this?

Come to think of it, you have been at the center of every exception in my life. It began with how desperately I had wished for your downfall. Why had I, who had never even wished for the downfall of the director who treated me like an animal, wished so desperately for yours alone? At the time I had believed it was all because of jealousy and hatred toward you, but now I understand the reason.

I had wanted you to become the same as me. I had wanted you, soaring through the sky, to fall to this earth where I lived, and for you to remain by my side forever. For me, who could not even dream of soaring through the sky alongside you, bringing you down was the only way.

“Why? Why did no one tell me?”

A resentment that knew not where it was directed spilled from between my lips. You were all the ones who told me that someone of lowly birth like me could never overcome certain walls, that my talent alone could never break through them. So why.

“That this was love, why did no one tell me? You told me everything else. Why not this?”

The resentment with nowhere to go turns its steps back and comes toward me.

There had been countless opportunities to realize that this feeling was love. Every moment you had whispered of love to me was one such opportunity. Yet I had been unable to realize it until the very end. I know it came from my distrust of everything in this world. You had wanted to shatter that distrust to the very end, but in the end, it is only now that I come to understand my own twisted heart.

Perhaps I would never have known even this feeling, had I not lost you. If your heart had not changed, I would have gone on laughing at it; if your heart had changed, I would have consoled myself that things had gone just as I expected. I would probably have lived my whole life that way.

Every moment I had faced since first meeting you passed before my eyes. You, who sometimes laughed and sometimes cried and always stayed by my side. The gaze that had been directed at me and no one else, the gentle touch full of warmth, all of it remains this vividly even now.

“You stupid bastard.”