Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

Against her best efforts, the cave’s trickery had pulled Izhari’s anger to the forefront. In the cold light of unvarnished reality, she finally understood the anger. It was anger at Tomita. It was anger for what he did to himself. Even if it had brought him to her, it was something she felt great animosity towards him.

In the early days, that anger had been judgmental and ignorant of his own personal struggles. She thought him weak and a coward. After the burden sharing began, she understood his suffering and even empathized with his struggles. But she still never found it in her heart to forgive him. In the weeks and months that followed, as they grew closer together and he proved to be a gentle, kindhearted person, the anger only grew more. Now she realized why.

Her question pulled him from his melancholy peace and ripped his mind back into sadness. Looking down at her as she continued to cry, Tomita felt shame, embarrassment, concern, and rejection.

“Why did you do it?” she asked once more.

Screams and wails from both of their voices bled through the veil of the pocket reality. Tomita shook them away and tried to gather his words.

Her question didn’t make him upset with her. He was upset with himself. If he could undo it all, there was a large part of him that would. That part was in raging conflict with the understanding that only by dying did he ever meet Izhari. Regardless, he focused his answer and gathered his words.

“It… it wasn’t… it w-w-wasn’t any one single thing… It was death by a thousand paper cuts…”

Izhari didn’t understand.

“It’s a phrase, another one. In my world, you could get cuts from pieces of paper. It was small. Nothing more than a sting and maybe a little blood. It would heal in a couple of days. One of those on its own was never a problem. But when hundreds after hundreds of them piled up. That was what c-chipped away at me and so many others.”

As he spoke, his shame spread and caused small tremors to shake his arms and hands, but he did not lower Izhari or stop his reflection.

“It… it… It was just a little bit of everything. A life of isolation. Loneliness is strange when you’re surrounded by forty million people, but you can’t connect with a single one. It was that. It was my mother leaving. It was my father’s violence. It was my bosses’ cruelty. It was the never-ending threat of being forced to relocate to Anchorage. It was the heat. It was degenerative disc disease in my back. It was a failing liver cursed by a family affliction. It was arthritis in my hands. It was the never-ending feeling that this was all life ever would be.”

“I don’t even know when or how it happened. One day, I just woke up and realized it was harder to exist. And from there, it only got harder. There was never a grand plan to kill myself. I just reached a point one day at lunch after getting a dozen calls from debt collectors and twenty email alerts. I couldn’t shake it that time. So, that night, I jumped from my building.”

Tears anointed his face with their warm flow as he mourned his existence and recalled the feeling of the wind rushing by that night when he free-fell seventy stories into a new reality.

Izhari’s paw caressed the scars under his left eye.

“I have been so mad at you…” she admitted.

“And I still am. Not because of what you did. But because you did it to yourself…” she said as her voice shook from the returning sobs.

“Existence is cruel, hateful, and full of never-ending hurt. But you, you are a kind, patient, gentle person. And you snuffed that light out. You hurt something precious and good and took it from your world. I have tried so hard to forgive you, but the more I see of your goodness, the harder it becomes. I don’t know if I will ever be able to move past it…” she said as her hand lowered.

“Izhari, there was nothing for me in that world. There was no one to mourn me. No one to miss that light…”

“I WOULD HAVE!” she cried.

A tear fell from his face on her exposed chest.

“Izhari, if you had been in that world, I never would have done it. I would have happily spent all my days with you, giving you the life we deserved.”

“WHY? I AM A WRETCH! I AM NOTHING! I AM NOTHING GOOD!!” she shouted in a confused plea.

“No. You are not a wretch. You are not nothing. And you are not bad. You just had a life where bad things happened to you. Please, please understand that.”

Sorrow won, and Izhari looked away from him. The tears and breaths of hate gained speed and her chest rose and fell in violent spasms as she lost control. Still, she tried to speak.

"Maybe, somewhere far away, in some other reality, that could have happened... Maybe you never hurt... Maybe I wasn't blind... M-Maybe my leg worked. Maybe we were never abandoned... Maybe... we..." she stopped and let out a wail.

Her paws locked and her claws extended in rage as though she was ready to tear into her skin once more. Holding her felt like holding a reactor core that was swiftly spinning into meltdown. But Tomita did not let go. Instead, he held on to her, feeling her small chest heaving against his as she wrestled with a thousand sorrows of her own.

He wanted his words to reach her, but to his great terror and sadness, they seemed too weak, or she was too far gone. Witnessing her continued collapse brought him more grief than his own death. For so long, he had wanted someone to try to stop him from spiraling. To reach out with a kind word. But it never came. Now, on the other side of things, he was finally the one who could do that for another who was getting closer and closer to the ledge of life, but for all of his efforts and words, it was still not enough. 

No matter how hard he tried, Izhari was falling further and further from him.