Chapter Text
scarlett.
i met eita otoya at a party so crowded it was hard to even breathe.
not that it mattered much. the music was too loud, the lights flashed too fast and i had already drank enough to stop caring about almost anything.
and i hadn't even wanted to leave the house that night, and looking back, i wished i never had. but either way, i believe our paths would have crossed regardless.
i had spent the last half hour staring at my own reflection in the bathroom mirror while my best friend hana screamed from the other side of the door that if i didn't come out right away, she would leave without me. and maybe i should have let her. maybe it would have been better that way. but after much persistence, a few ignored messages from the boys and shots of the vodka i kept hidden in my closet burning down my throat, i went.
and that's where everything started.
or ended. i still can't tell.
i remember seeing him for the first time leaning against the makeshift bar set up in the kitchen, surrounded by too many people and smiling as if the entire world existed solely to entertain him. eita otoya seemed to belong to that specific type of people who turned self-destruction into something beautiful. irritatingly beautiful. i think he noticed i was staring because he smirked right after our eyes met for the first time. slow, lazy, like someone who already knew exactly the effect he had on people. the kind of smile that should have come with a warning sign. and unfortunately, he really did have an effect.
otoya was selfish, impulsive, loud, cruel, chaotic, irresponsible, arrogant, destructive, suffocating, dangerous, and addictive, all while being charming, warm, confident, daring, passionate and absurdly beautiful.
never, in a million years, would he have gone unnoticed by me. because he was exactly the kind of disaster people fall in love with. and i had a very strong tendency toward self-destruction.
otoya was the type of person who made self-destruction look like intimacy, love, and warmth, wrapping you up in him in a way that made you lose yourself completely in the vastness of who he was.
but i think, deep down, the real problem was never him. it was the way something inside of me recognized the chaos in him and decided to call it home, making us find the worst possible versions of ourselves and calling it love.