I feel loved


Disclaimer: God, I’m depressed!


  
    People can be so cruel in their own happiness. So vile and despicable 
just by standing at the top of the wheel of fortune when you have hung at the 
bottom for so many years. 
“ Have a nice night you two!” Nabiki threw a package of condoms at Ranma.
    The young martial artist simply stared at what his hand had caught from 
reflex alone. Akane was unperturbed.
“ Only a six-pack?” Akane sighed. “ I guess it’s oral after six times.” The 
youngest Tendo sighed in disappointment.
“ Got the icewater?” Nabiki continued.
    Ranma squealed in horror.
“ Now that’s just going too far.” Akane agreed, but with a evil glint in her 
eye.
    Soon after Akane literally drug Ranma into her room. The poor boy looked 
like he was about to faint at any moment. Nabiki had smirked at the closed 
door before traipsing off to her own room. She turned and watched her father 
giggle in delight and sake. Genma likewise was both inebriated and elated. 
Arm in arm the two fathers strutted off in triumph. She looked about for a 
moment, as if expecting to find someone else. Once masculine yelps began to 
drift through the door she scuttled off to her own room.
    After a while the moans and screams were too much for her to tune out. 
But they just kept on going, Ranma the wild horse. Every so often she could 
hear a call ring up from downstairs.
“ GO RANMA GOOOO!” Soun bellowed.
“ THAT’S MY BOY!” Genma joined.
“ CAN I JOIN?” Nabiki cried in jest.
    Why don’t they just stop finally? Did they have to keep rutting like 
animals!? Didn’t either of them know how much it was hurting her to hear them 
scream out each other’s name? No, they wouldn’t know. But that was her doing, 
all she had to do was tell them how she felt and everything would be better, 
right? Then why hadn’t she told anyone? In all these years why hadn’t she 
told anyone? Because she couldn’t, she had to be strong. She had to be the 
cup that held all the pain that overflowed from her family. The one who kept 
her father from insanity after the funeral. The one who stopped Nabiki from 
taking fifty sleeping pills the same year. The one who held Akane until she 
cried herself to sleep for months. But no one knew that she had lost her 
mind, that she came so close to taking those pills herself, that she cried 
herself to sleep even all these years later. She had to act happy, if only 
just to cheer up them. Every time the pain was too much and spilled out she 
was there to take it for them, to make everything better again. Who made 
things better for her, who would catch what spilled when the pain was too 
much for her? No one.
    After all, she had to be the good child. Being a mother to her sisters 
and a housekeeper to her father meant she couldn’t afford the usual trauma 
and tribulations afforded everyone else in their youth. She had to learn to 
be an adult and stick to it no matter how much it hurt. The good daughter, 
the big sister who could do anything.
    In highschool she didn’t date, too many obligations she told herself. The 
truth…the truth was that despite how she tried it just never seemed to happen 
for her. Even when she broke tradition and started asking guys out it never 
happened. She was twenty and she had never done more than kiss a man. Now her 
seventeen year old baby sister was married and loudly consummating that 
marriage. Nabiki always had a sting of men at her beck and call. All her 
highschool friends were either in college or married, or both. It sickened her 
every time she caught herself yearning for someone so badly that it hurt. That 
she would cry silently in the dead of night, clutching her chest as if her heart 
beat in a cage of thorns.
    She looked at herself in the mirror for the tenth time that night. What 
she saw was so pathetic that she would have wept if it had been anyone but 
her own reflection. There she sat, on her bed without at stitch of clothing 
on, crying without a sound as she listened to her sister and Ranma share 
something she never would.
    Each night the pain was worse. Years ago it had only been a intangible 
sadness after the raw grief had become only a painful scar. But each night 
the sadness was just one night stronger. Every night the sadness was one night 
greater. When she was fifteen it had become too great to be intangible any 
longer. Since then the ache in her heart had grown to a twinge that sharpened to 
a tearing pain with each beat. These days she cried herself to sleep with her 
heart wrapped in a cage of thorns.
    She looked at the clock, twelve twenty nine at night. Akane and Ranma had 
only been going at it for twenty five minutes. But the thorns around her 
heart were already losing their sting. She managed a small smile of triumph, 
she even savored the taste of her salty tears. While she still could she lay 
back on her bed and got comfortable. The room seemed so bright, even though 
the curtains were drawn shut and no lights were on.
    The screams of physical rapture continued. She had expected them to start 
to fade, or seem far away. Instead the only two changes she noticed as the 
clock marched on was the lack of sensation along her body. She had been cold 
before, now the bed seemed to have ceased to exist to her skin. 
     Nabiki yelled some sort of encouragement. Akane’s screams intensified. 
It was getting hard to move now. Every time she moved her head to look at the 
clock it took twice as long to move it back. Finally she decided to stop 
looking, after all, it did not matter any longer.
    After a while something caught her attention as the sounds finally 
started to grow distant. Ranma’s screams were drowning out Akane’s. How 
unexpected. It was getting hard to breathe now. The room was finally dimming, 
though her eyes were open.
    Wasn’t this the point where you were supposed to become retrospective? 
But hadn’t she already done that enough? 
    She thought that the pain in her heart would leave before the end, but 
she could still feel each pained beat, though the pain was so muted that she 
still felt triumph over it at long last. Though to feel her lungs exhale 
their last still unsettled. Now there was nothing, save for the pain in her 
heart.
    Wait, something was wrong, horribly wrong! There was light again. Why was 
she starting to see light? But the pain was gone finally! At least the last 
few beats of her heart would be free. Still, what was this warm light? It 
felt warm, right down into her heart, sunshine upon her face. She tried to 
speak, to voice her final thought after her heart had beat its last in warm 
light. She tried to make her last words: At last, I feel loved.


























    In Japan one delicacy is Fugu, where the puffer fish is prepared so that 
the poison is not present in the finished dish.
    The poison in fugu, or puffer fish, is extremely lethal. One liver has 
enough poison to kill thousands. The result of tetdrodotoxin poisoning is 
death by muscular paralysis, respiratory depression, and circulatory failure.