The Premonition

by Banana Yoshimoto

It was over now, but it had to be. In coming to an end, it had given me something, and only by making my way through was I able to begin to live the rest of my life.

Leaving home was what I did when I had things to figure out.

The only thing I didn’t completely understand was why, this time, I found myself heading to my aunt’s house.

I had a premonition of setting out on a journey and getting lost inside a distant tide as the sun went down, ending up far, far away from where I started.

For whatever reason, I had no memories from my childhood. Not in my mind, or in photos—nothing.

It’s not just my childhood memories. There’s something even more important I’m forgetting.

I guess you need to have a home before you can run away from it, I thought, and I felt it in my heart.

. . . I have family, blood family, somewhere . . . not here.

Days that were endless, but which you could only take one at a time, with no sense of what was coming tomorrow . . . I still can’t shake it. It lives inside me like a curse or a blessing.”

Maybe I was jealous of her for having those memories.

Behind her hair, her sweet ringing voice, her long fingers on the piano, she harbored something vast, lost, and familiar, and it was like a siren call to those of us who were missing parts of our childhoods.

“When people see too many of something, it just makes them feel sad. No one knows why.”

It’s kind of tragic, I thought, how we can never completely escape our childhoods.

I’d never known a love before that could blot out the world around it like this.