A Wonderful World

"I will take death in any way and form it comes to me, anywhere and anytime."

That had to be the most brazen statement I'd heard. It took me a bit to take that statement in.

"You really have no special requests? If I can, I'd like to make it up to you", I sat down and stared at his bloodied face.

He shook his head.

"Make up for what?", he asked.

He didn't know me yet to call me "boy" but I suppose that's the way it had to be.

I had become better at rewriting the reality. I could write quite far back in certain cases. For example, in Sight's case, I made it so he never met Lady and Chopper on the night he killed the prima donna, Czarna Dalia.

Before meeting them he didn't know anything about what he'd been doing. He didn't know what an outcast was, even though he himself was an outcast. Ignorance is indeed the greatest of all blisses. And I thought for Sight, it had to be the biggest saving.

Lady was right. People who see things differently are the most dangerous of all. Especially those who can't see other people's way. I could give the entire world to Sight but he'd never fit in. It isn't the world outside that makes them so alien, it's the world inside their heads that keeps them from connecting with anything.

I killed him in the ruins of the capital. I didn't try to save Czarna Dalia. But I made sure Chopper hadn't met him yet. Knowing that Lady and Chopper would come around and find his corpse, I made sure not to dally around.

"What kind of world do you really wish for?", I asked.

"What?"

I chuckled.

It was impossible getting through to him. I couldn't see his way just as he couldn't see mine. I wondered if it still might take me some more years to understand people like him.

Seeing that there was no common ground on which we could converse and as he was bleeding profusely, I decided to take my leave. I stood up and watched as his breathing slowed down considerably.

"You've got wonderful eyes", I said what I always meant to tell him, just before pulling one out of his skull.

His right eye had been destroyed completely during our fight. So I took the only one that remained intact. I figured it would do me more good now that he was dead. I knew I'd have a hard time fighting him but I seemed to have come farther than I assumed. How many times had it been already? I knew I was culling my own memories just to stay sane. I had forgotten about most of the worlds that I ended up creating.

Thanks to Chopper's power, I could slice through realities without distorting an existing world. Every time I wanted to change reality, I sliced the currently existing world. One slice existed as it is, while the other one was all mine to manipulate. I found out this way, the chances of failure were far less.

For one, I was much more selective now. I wasn't trying to save everyone and everything. I created many many worlds by slicing them in half. This way I could test out as many outcomes as I wanted. Redoing the same world over and over again created nothing but an unpredictable mess. But now that I was slicing them half, I could see a lot more options. My reach had increased too.

I figured that if not in one world than in another, I could kill Sight. I'm sure I had fought with him in many worlds before I was finally capable of beating him now. But I had erased my memory of those worlds. The instinct remained, the muscles remembered. Everything had just gone behind a veil.

"I'm trying to guess what'll make you happy", I'd said to Sight in one such world.

"Why, boy? What a nice boy you are today, boy!", he answered casually.

"I'm not trying to be nice, Sight. But really, what's the one thing you'd want to have if you could have everything?", I asked.

His answer was nothing but a very long, awkward laugh. Awkward for me, not him. And when the laugh was over, both of us seemed to have dropped the topic.

There had been times when Sight and I went on day long journeys and walked all day without saying anything of meaning. That's how Sight was. And yet, it wasn't that he was cold. I think Sight simply couldn't see why the world thought it was such a big deal to exist.

He didn't think he had anything to repent for.

I think he didn't care about the way he existed. He could have been a grasshopper and he'd have been just as dandy.

I didn't create a world for him where he could be happy. I'm sure he existed in all the worlds I'd left behind and in many of those, he'd have lived to the fullest and died an old man. And in each and every one of those worlds, he'd have been just as happy.

There was no definition of happiness, no path down the valley of great life for him. Sight simply lived one day at a time without counting up the good and the bad and when at the end of the day, nothing amounted to anything, he slept in peace, without a care that the next day should come.

I wish all of us could be like that. Without regrets, remorse, and a care in the world. I'm sure that'd be a very short-lived and chaotic world. But at least once, I'd like to see all of us letting go of everything that we so tightly hold on to that it ends up hurting us.

Maybe if sins weren't there to tie us down, we'd have all gone up in a blast by now. Wouldn't you say that's a wonderful world?