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February 9 - February 18, 2017
Probably is a word you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.
This kind of empty, meaningless life was hurting Yukiko deeply.
Life isn’t that easy, and I don’t think it should be.
I was living in a void.
Yet as long as these illusions surrounded me, I was paralyzed.
The rain twisted time and reality.
Lots of different ways to live. And lots of different ways to die. But in the end … all that remains is a desert.
But once I acknowledged that the envelope had disappeared, its existence and nonexistence traded places in my consciousness.
Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality—call it an alternate reality—to prove the reality of events.
To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw.
Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist. But something can happen to sever that chain, and we are a...
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Not a trace of feeling grazed her face; it was like the bottom of a deep ocean, silent and dead.
Barely able to support my body, I breathed slowly. For a moment or two, my sense of self really did break down, its very outlines melting away into a thick, syrupy goo.
She was still alive, in an unblinking world. In a deep, silent world behind that pane of glass, she lived. And her lips, motionless, spoke of an infinite nothingness.
This wasn’t the body that Shimamoto had so gently loved. It was the body of a middle-aged man, giving off an awful acrid stink.
I was drained, completely, leaving an empty shell behind. A hollow sound reverberated through my body.
For several days afterward, I couldn’t speak. I’d open my mouth to talk, but the words would disappear, as if the utter nothingness that was Izumi had taken over.
Something inside me was severed, and disappeared. Silently. Forever.
“As Time Goes By.”
“All of us are living there. But actually what’s really living is the desert itself.
If I left you now, I don’t know what would happen to me. I don’t want to be lonely ever again. I’d rather die.”
If I had, my body would not exist. I would be gone, lost forever. Like so many other things. But here I am. And here is Yukiko’s warm hand on my chest
Yet here I am, hurting you. Because I’m a selfish, hopeless, worthless human being. For no apparent reason, I hurt the
people around me and end up hurting myself. Ruining someone else’s life and my own. Not because I like to. But that’s how it ends up.”
“I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality.
By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself–as long as I made the effort.
No matter where I go, I still...
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The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself.
the reason I’m still alive, is that I thought if you were to come back to me, I would be able to take you back.
“Rights are what you build from here on out,” Yukiko said. “Or rather, we build. We thought we’d constructed a lot together, but actually we hadn’t made a thing.
Still, something is chasing me. I wake up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat. I’m being chased by what I threw away. You think you’re the only one being chased, but you’re wrong. You’re not the only one who’s thrown away something, who’s lost something.
I had no more illusions.
I might very well be changing. And I had to change.
I thought. No more visions can help me, weaving special dreams just for me. As far as the eye can see, the void is simply that–a void. I’ve been in that void before and forced myself to adjust.
No one will weave dreams for me–it is my turn to weave dreams for others. That’s what I have to do. Such dreams may have no power, but if my own life is to have any meaning at all, that is what I have to do.
At one end of the sky a line of blue appeared, and like blue ink on a piece of paper, it spread slowly across the horizon. If you gathered together all the shades of blue in the world and picked the bluest, the epitome of blue, this was the color you would choose.
A new day had begun. But what this day would bring, I had no idea.
At night, in the stillness, I swore I could hear the sound of my flesh growing. I was about to be clothed in a new self, about to step into a place where I’d never been.
They were the ones who needed this new day, much more than I ever would.
Inside that darkness, I saw rain falling on the sea. Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don’t know it is raining. Until someone came and lightly rested a hand on my shoulder, my thoughts were of the sea.
