Goodbye Tsugumi

by Banana Yoshimoto

It’s a marvelous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent. You never get tired of watching it. And no matter how rough the waves get, you’re never bothered by the noise the water makes or by the commotion of the surface—it never seems too loud, or too wild.

“Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too—that’s just the way things work.

But people never notice that warmth until after they’ve emerged. You don’t even notice that you’ve been inside until it’s too late for you ever to go back—that’s how perfect the temperature of that blanket is.

Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we’ve ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.

It occurs to me that perhaps this is what people mean by “nostalgia”: the pain of knowing that this powerful yearning will eventually fade.

No matter where you are, you’re always a bit on your own, always an outsider.

. The knowledge that as long as I went on living I would always have chances to feel these nights made it possible for me to have hope for the future.

On rainy days like this both the past and the future dissolve quietly into the air and hover there, surrounding you.

“Love is the kind of thing that’s already happening by the time you notice it, that’s how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn’t change.

This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the next—and I didn’t want to forget a single one.

it’s more that people can’t help coming into contact with new things all the time, one thing after the next, and so bit by bit they just keep changing on you, you know? They forget all kinds of stuff, whittle stuff away, and there’s nothing you can do about that—they’re bound to do it.

We see all kinds of different things as we grow up. And with each instant that passes we change into something new. We keep moving forward, and as we move we keep being confronted by this fact, over and over again, in many different ways. But if there were one thing that I wanted to hold on to even with this knowledge, to retain just as it was, it would be this evening. I didn’t need anything else, I didn’t need anything more—that’s how happy we were then, how full the air surrounding us was with a small and quiet joy.