The Secret to Innocence: Non-Human

I find myself in a sort of filthy, repulsive crudity-- when my flesh is ripened with life, I see myself in the most extraordinarily unattractiveness.

I loathed it: when the blood pulsed in my blood like septic, when the sweat trickled down my skin, the fabric of my clothing sticking to my skin, the filthy, repulsive sensation of my flesh, the vessels in my eyes that seem undead; red, branching out across the white of my selcra—a sickening sign of being alive.

I loathed it and despised it more than anything else in the world; I wanted to rip my flesh apart, make it melt off my skin, make my stomach fall out to the floorboard, drain out the blood pumping through my capillaries, make my arteries clog, for my arterioles to coagulate, for my limbs to turn a sickening corpse, a corpse-like dullness, and oxidize—turn blue and purplish, and let veins covered by thin hide be grossly exposed.

It is the splendous form of myself, the only form where each and every single mask concealing my grotesque, hollow self is ripped out of my very being; when the slope of my stomach is inwards, when my hip bones protrude from thin skin, when my diaphragm and ribs stick sickenly, and each bone looks like a mountain range on the plateau of my pectorals; the way scars turn beautiful, thrumming pink, and fade dark into a luscious shade of near-blue when it’s cold; the vibrancy of blood as it trickles down his tainted flesh.

With that, I would be the epitome of "pulchritudinous" the pique of beguilment, splayed as a corpse.

Too bad, my flesh is still as anchored as ever and in a stable state.

I would love my eyes sunken in, my lips silenced, skin as cold as the boomerang nebula.

Too bad, my body has a bad taste of being alive.

What a shame, Indeed.

— written in the perspective of Dazai Osamu.