I hate myself for this. Genuinely, I do. But there’s this… relief. This sickening, creeping sense of ease I get whenever I think about the end of that thing. And I hate that I feel it, because it’s wrong, isn’t it? It’s absolutely, fundamentally wrong to feel anything but sadness, or maybe just… emptiness. But I don’t. I feel this awful, quiet surge of something almost like joy, and it burns in my gut like acid. I mean, the whole situation—it was a given. Everyone around here, they knew. Knew it was coming, knew what it meant. And for so long, it was this looming cloud, this heavy, suffocating blanket over everything. Over someone else’s life, yeah, but over mine too, in a way. That constant hum of worry, the endless demands, the sheer weight of it all. Living in a place where everyone knows your business, where there's no escaping the quiet judgments or the sympathetic glances… it just amplified everything. There were no options really, no alternatives, just… that. Forever. And now it’s not. And I’m angry. So angry that I can even think this way, that my first reaction wasn't just pure, unadulterated grief. It's like a betrayal of everything decent. But underneath the anger, there's that flicker. That awful, undeniable flicker of freedom, of possibility. And I’m so ashamed of it, I could scream. Because what kind of person feels that? What kind of monster? I just want it to go away. I just want to feel what I'm supposed to feel. But I don't. And that's the worst part.