~You know how to hate, but you do not know how to love.~
1. The Bat in My Hand
I stood with the bat in my hand—
as if the world had chosen a single frozen image to become the truth.
In their eyes, I was no longer the one who discovered.
I became the one who did it.
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2. My Name Called Like a Verdict
The teachers shouted my name like a hammer striking my skull from the inside.
"Satoshi!"
The name sounded foreign.
As if it were being called for someone else who merely wore my face.
Without resistance,
I surrendered myself.
Not because I was guilty.
But because in that moment,
I was too tired to defend my humanity.
The bat was snatched from me as evidence—
and at the same time,
something greater was taken:
my assumption that truth still had a definite shape.
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3. The Corridor of Gossip
They led me through a corridor filled with whispers.
I no longer saw faces.
Only mouths.
Only voices.
Only poisonous words.
"Sex offender."
The label was born just like that—
light on their tongues,
crushing on my chest.
And from that moment on,
my image was no longer mine.
I became a story.
I became gossip.
I became a monster that was easy to understand because it could be hated without thought.
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4. A Dam Inside My Chest
My anger searched for an exit like water trapped behind a dam.
It mixed with shame.
And from that mixture was born something more dangerous: hatred toward myself.
I needed somewhere to pour out the emotions that nearly overflowed under the weight of the accusations. Anger and shame collided in my chest, tearing at each other until breathing felt tight.
Did I deserve all this?
No. Absolutely not.
But the world never asks who deserves what.
It only chooses who is easiest to sacrifice.
I tried to defend myself.
I said I was there to look for Hiroshi.
I said I was only carrying out his parents' request.
That my presence was not a sin, but a form of responsibility. Yet my words fell one by one before they could become truth.
My words hit the floor like a cracked glass:
they made a sound,
but held nothing.
The teachers looked at me with eyes that had already finished deciding.
"Doesn't make sense," they said.
"No parent would entrust their child to a classmate of the same age."
Their logic became a hammer.
And once again, I was nailed as the defendant without room to breathe.
At that moment, I heard a thin laugh.
Not loud.
Not open mockery.
Just a small sound—
more cruel because it required no courage.
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5. A Timeline No One Needed
I insisted.
I said I was framed.
That I was the victim.
That Hiroshi and his two friends did it.
I told the chronology in as much detail as possible,
stitching each second back together like someone trying to save his own torn body.
But my words fell onto a cracked floor: heard, but never truly listened to. The teachers looked at me with eyes that had already passed judgment.
Truth was no longer measured by the sequence of events.
It was measured by who held the bloodiest object.
And that object was in my hand.
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6. A Prison in My Palm
My phone became the next prison.
The phone had been in Hiroshi's hands. I don't know at what moment he slipped the recording into it, but when it was checked, the screen spit out the most devastating reality for me—playing evidence I could not deny:
the girls' locker room.
Teenage bodies who did not yet understand what it meant to be watched by dirty eyes.
And the world decided it was all my doing.
That evidence closed every door of defense. Every word I wanted to say turned into an empty excuse. Every stare hardened into a blade that slowly stripped away my dignity. At that point, I realized—I was no longer merely suspected. I had officially been cast as the culprit in a story I never wrote.
More painfully, those two facts alone were already enough to bury my defense alive.
Added to one final accusation:
the testimony of the teacher who was struck in the head.
He did not see the face.
He did not know who swung the bat.
But he knew one thing:
when he fell,
I was there.
And ignorance is often trusted more than complicated truth.
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7. The Good Kid and the Scapegoat
Hiroshi was the class leader.
A "good" kid.
A kid who was "not the type to do such things."
While I—
more vocal,
more outspoken,
more often seen—
became the perfect shape for a perpetrator.
At that point I understood something with terrifying clarity:
reality does not always choose the most guilty.
It chooses the most convincing.
And that day,
the most convincing one to destroy
was me.
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8. Reality Chooses What Is Convincing
I closed my eyes.
Not because I admitted guilt.
But because I was too afraid to see a world that chose to twist me into someone I no longer recognized.
I knew it was unfair.
But when an entire room has agreed to hate you,
justice becomes a word that sounds like a stale joke.
At that moment, I no longer cared about truth.
I cared about only one thing:
survival.
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9. The Gray Territory
Humans often divide feelings into two:
love and hate.
But there is a gray territory between them—
a nameless region
where sympathy, pity, and need collide without rules.
My attention toward Hiroshi was born there.
From pity.
From the need to be needed.
From the desire to be someone meaningful to another person.
And without realizing it,
I put a venomous snake into my own mouth—
then closed it tightly so no one would see.
One prejudice might still be brushed aside.
Two might still be fought.
But this time,
the accusations against me were woven like a rope made of many threads.
Five.
Six.
Who knows how many.
And the more threads there were,
the more impossible it became to remove the rope without tearing my own skin.
A cornered human's first instinct is self-protection.
I was the same.
I tried.
I shouted.
I explained.
I struggled with words.
But there is a point where effort becomes mere decoration—
present only to convince ourselves that we once fought back.
Because when everything is already too late,
resistance becomes only a slow movement before drowning.
It felt like being pierced by an invisible blade.
No blood.
No instant death.
But it keeps eroding from within.
And at that point I understood:
I was not losing my freedom.
I was losing who I truly was.