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But sometimes, without even realizing it, we trample on people’s feelings, hurt their pride, make them feel bad.
“There’s nothing worth getting in this world that you can get easily.”
“But, when you put in that much time and effort, if you do achieve that difficult thing it becomes the cream of your life.”
“Things like this happen sometimes in our lives,” I told him. “Inexplicable, illogical events that nevertheless are deeply disturbing. I guess we need to not think about them, just close our eyes and get through them. As if we were passing under a huge wave.”
Your brain is made to think about difficult things. To help you get to a point where you understand something that you didn’t understand at first. And that becomes the cream of your life. The rest is boring and worthless.
But back then it was beyond me to imagine what feelings this entailed—for a woman to want a man to make love to her. (And even now, come to think of it, I don’t entirely understand it.)
“Loving someone is like having a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance,”
Like two straight lines overlapping, we momentarily crossed at a certain point, then went our separate ways.
Each and every moment, our bodies are on a one-way journey to collapse and deterioration, unable to turn back the clock. I close my eyes, I open them again, only to realize that in the interim so many things have vanished. Buffeted by the intense midnight winds, these things—some with names, some without—disappear without a trace. All that is left is a faint memory. Even memory, though, can hardly be relied on. Can anyone say for certain what really happened to us back then?
I think what makes me feel sad about the girls I knew growing old is that it forces me to admit, all over again, that my youthful dreams are gone forever. The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being. Sometimes it all seems so unfair.
I’ve heard it said that the happiest time in our lives is the period when pop songs really mean something to us, really get to us. It may be true. Or maybe not. Pop songs may, after all, be nothing but pop songs. And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more.
When she looked at me, it was as though she were ignoring the outside (granted, it wasn’t much to look at anyway) and could see right through me, down to the depths of my being. I may have felt that way because I really did have shame and guilt in my heart.
In the opening of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and I think the same applies to women’s faces in terms of beauty or ugliness.
Happiness is always a relative thing.
Of course, winning is much better than losing. No argument there. But winning or losing doesn’t affect the weight and value of the time. It’s the same time, either way. A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour. We need to cherish it. We need to deftly reconcile ourselves with time, and leave behind as many precious memories as we can—that’s what’s the most valuable.
In back of the bar was a shelf with an impressive lineup of bottles. And behind that was a large mirror, in which I was reflected. I stared at it for a while, and as you might expect, the me in the mirror stared back. A sudden thought hit me, that somewhere I’d taken a wrong turn in life. And the longer I stared at my image decked out in a suit and tie, this sensation only intensified. The more I stared at my image, the more it seemed less like me and more like someone I’d never seen before. But if this isn’t me in the mirror, I thought, then who is it?
