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There are so many things she wants to tell Raku.
Confessions to make, so she can finally be free of their weight.
She wishes that there was someone else who could help her shoulder this cross. But she is all alone now, with nothing but her ugly regrets as company.
Maybe it's better this way. Who else would understand anyway?
Hitoshi and Bokutachi are nowhere to be found. They abandoned Raku long ago, for all Hitoshi's claims of friendship and tomodachis.
Vet-san brings up too many complicated feelings about Raku, feelings that Koneko is far too cowardly to face directly. She is subtle and oblique and a calm, cool-headed liar who could never be honest with her emotions, not before and certainly not now.
So it is her alone who faces the finality of the cold stone slab. It is not the closure she so fervently wished for, but it is all she has received from the world. There is no other option but to keep dragging her beaten up heart onwards.
She pauses, considers.
Hey, Raku-chan.
She has no idea what she wants to say, unaware of anything except the paradoxical desire to confess her sins while also concealing them; to speak that evil aloud into existence but also remain silent as if to protect a long dead girl's innocence.
It feels like sacrilege to be standing here and mourning. She is a sinner who can only taint and ruin and stain, a sad and ugly thing standing in the light of a girl's eternally pristine soul.
I bet you would be ashamed of me now. Maybe you would even hate me. I would hate me. I hate myself. I hate THEM. I hate them so, so, much. They killed you and they were, ARE, too cowardly to accept the blame so they ran and I hunted them down but they got away like they always do I hate them I hate them I HATE them
She tries to banish the thoughts of the traitors, the man she once called a friend and his worthless lover, who thought of Raku no further than as a brief footnote from the past. An unfortunate casualty of their love affair.
They should be suffering too. Why aren't they? Why? I'm suffering. It hurts so much. Like I'm being crushed to death. Why am I the only one not allowed to move on? Why do they deserve happiness? I don't want to be the only one in agony. I wish that they would feel even a fraction of my pain, so at least I wouldn't be all alone.
I know. I'm such a horrible person. But I can't find the strength to care anymore.
Koneko is bitter, and she knows it. Sometimes she is filled with shame at the ferocity with which she loathes and curses Hitoshi and Bokutachi. Other times she is filled only with vindictive pleasure at the thought of their imagined suffering. She knows that she has treated them unfairly, but she cannot take back the mistakes borne from her warped mind any more than she can cheerfully eat mochi ice cream together with Raku.
And so she clings on to her hatred like a mockery of a good luck charm, strangling her heart with a string of barbed wire. Koneko knows that it won't achieve anything, that her hatred is misaimed, that she is being irrational. But she just can't bring herself to try and escape that self-inflicted suffering. It is her punishment, her penance.
She cannot forgive. She cannot be forgiven.
If she was stronger, maybe, she might have been able to.
But she isn't, and so it seems the weight of her guilt and misery is inescapable. There is no absolution waiting for her, so she might as well get acquainted with hate, the one familiar constant in her life that she can rely on to never abandon her.
It hurts to hate, but it hurts more to try to love.
She does not want to think about love. About what maybe, perhaps, possibly, potentially, could have been.
What Raku might be like now if she was still alive is a forever unanswerable question. But even so…
I wish I could see you again, just one more time.
The thought alone is painful.
It hurts beyond words.
All she can manage is that it hurts, it hurts, even when there are so many other things she wishes she could say.
So many sins to confess to.
But she remains silent. The thoughts spiraling through her head remain half formed and half realized, and eventually sink back down into the abyss of her unconscious mind.
She smiles her usual fake smile and says, "see you later," and tries walking away, but she can't quite resist that familiar self-destructive urge, like picking a scab off of her heart to make it bleed again.
"...I love you."
Of course she gets no reply from the empty patch on the ground, brown as dead scar tissue.
It's just dirt now.