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I’m going to die any day now, and here I am wasting my time writing up lists? You’ve got to be kidding.
Each name seemed to carry a hidden meaning. Countless people with whom I seemed to have had some kind of a relationship, but when push comes to shove, I didn’t actually share much of a connection with them after all.
Here I was standing at death’s door and I couldn’t think of a single person I cared enough about to call.
If you’ve gained something, it means that someone, somewhere, has lost something. Even happiness is built on someone else’s misfortune. She often reminded me of this. In fact, she considered it one of the laws of the universe.
make us believe that we can’t live without it. When human beings invented the mobile phone, they also invented the anxiety that comes with not having one on you.
Throughout history we’ve given birth to new things, only to lose the old way of doing things. I was beginning to think that maybe God was on to something when he struck his deal with the devil.
In actuality, I think the romance between us had been over for quite a while. But for some reason we carried on playing anyway, following all the rules. But then all it took was a few days in Buenos Aires to make it obvious that those rules were meaningless.
When we parted ways at the station near her house, she gave me a faint smile as we said our good-byes. I still remember that smile. It was embedded in my memory and implanted somewhere deep in my heart. It was like an old football injury that ached on rainy days. But I guess that’s not that unusual. I must have a whole collection of small injuries, tucked away somewhere in the recesses of my memory. I suppose those are what some people call regrets.
I assumed that because I was happy, she must be happy, too.
Love tends to fizzle out over time. And even though everyone knows that, it doesn’t stop anyone from falling in love. I guess it’s the same with life. We all know it has to end someday, but even so, we act as if we’re going to live forever. Like love, life is beautiful because it must come to an end.
In the old days before mobile phones and email, people would write letters to each other. They would imagine the letters reaching their loved ones and wonder what their reaction would be once they received it. Then they would eagerly wait for another letter in response, checking the mailbox each day.
The process reminded me a bit of gift giving. It’s not so much the object you’re giving that you’re excited about, but the look on the recipient’s face and how happy they’ll be once they open it.
The little man continued: “There’s something just as inevitable as death. And that’s life.”
What about the almost unbearable high I get from listening to the Beatles while speeding along on my bike?
It seems to me that the idea of something disappearing from the world and what the world would actually be like without it are two totally different things.
I realized then that when a person talks about something they really love, there’s a kind of thrill to listening to them.
He tells the dancer: “Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.”
‘I’ve got a good story and someone to tell it to.’
What did I gain by growing up, and what did I lose? I know the answer to only the second part of that question. Innocence—all those precious hopes and dreams that you can only have when you’re in your adolescence.
But whatever we choose, I have only one request—that during the sad scenes, upbeat music should play in the background.
If my life were a movie, I’d want it to be memorable in some way, no matter how modest the production was. I’d hope it would mean something to someone, somehow. That it would give them a boost and spur them on. After the credits, life does go on. My hope is that my life will go on to live in the memories of others who’ve witnessed my story.
It’s funny how one strange thing is often followed by another. Like when you lose your keys and then you invariably end up losing your wallet. Or in a baseball game when your team’s down almost the entire game, but then someone hits a home run, followed by another and another.
As I recalled the postcards and rediscovered my stamp collection, it finally dawned on me why I ended up being a postman. The stamp collection became very precious to me. I would spend ages gazing at them and imagining all the different countries they’d come from. There were all kinds of pictures and designs on them, pictures of people and places I could only imagine.
