Kitchen

by Banana Yoshimoto

There are people who choose to live their lives in filth; this is hard for me to understand. People who purposely do abhorrent things, just for the attention it draws to them, until they themselves are trapped. I cannot understand it, and no matter how much they suffer I cannot feel pity for them.

i've been realizing these days that there is beauty in not understanding why people do horrible things and it used to eat away at me when i tried to understand them. but at the end of the day, ive realized your inability to understand these things only speaks to the softness of your own heart and the considerate way you approach life and the people around you

People aren’t overcome by situations or outside forces; defeat invades from within, I thought. I had lost my last ounce of strength. Before my eyes something was coming to an end, something I didn’t want to end, but for which I lacked the energy to suffer, much less fight. There was only a leaden hopelessness in me.

A lover should die after a long lifetime. I lost Hitoshi at the age of twenty, and I suffered from it so much that I felt as if my own life had stopped. The night he died, my soul went away to some other place and I couldn’t bring it back. It was impossible to see the world as I had before. My brain ebbed and flowed, unstable, and I passed the days in a relentless state of dull oppression.