The Premonition

by Banana Yoshimoto

What made her beautiful to me was more like a specific mood whose tendrils pervaded everything, from the way she moved to the way she passed her days to the fleeting expressions that passed across her face when something happened.

It was a topic I should let lie, I knew. It was like teetering across a tightrope on a lonely night, when all you can see in the dark is your own feet on the white rope. You don’t feel ready, but there’s no going back.

My aunt loved the Friday the 13th movies, and that night, she was lying on the floor engrossed in watching whichever installments she’d checked out from the video rental place that week. “What do you like so much about them?” I’d asked her. After thinking for a minute, she said, “It’s nice how the same person always comes back. So you don’t feel lonely.”

Strange to think how I’d always felt anxious in my warm home, yet here, where daily life felt so precarious, I was fulfilled.

This is what she was really like, I thought. A woman with eyes that can see straight into your heart.

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.”

The more beautiful a night away from home was, the more regretful it made you feel.

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

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