The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

by Laura Imai Messina

As children we see happiness in things. A toy train sticking out of a basket or the plastic film around a slice of cake. Or a photograph of a scene in which we are at the center, all eyes on us. As adults it gets more complicated. Happiness is success, work, a man or a woman. All vague, laborious things. Whether it’s a word we use in relation to our lives or not, it’s mostly just that, a word.

“Time may pass, but the memory of the people we’ve loved doesn’t grow old. It is only we who age,”

“The superficial knowledge of a subject is often more harmful than absolute ignorance.”

i see this all the time in the IT industry

We need to possess joy in abundance before we can bestow it upon somebody else.

Later, Yui realized she had learned another important thing in that place of confinement: that silencing a man was equivalent to erasing him forever. And so it was important to tell stories, to talk to people, to talk about people. To listen to people talking about other people. Even to speak with the dead, if it helped.

“We’re still parents, even when our children are no longer here.”

A famous citation from the American psychotherapist Virginia Satir (1916–1988) reads: “We need four hugs a day for survival. We need eight hugs a day for maintenance. And we need twelve hugs a day for growth.”

Yui and Takeshi gradually realized that the Wind Phone was like a verb that conjugated differently for each person: everybody’s grief looked the same at first but was, ultimately, unique.

Habit is a remedy, people would say; you can get used to anything if you do it enough. It took him less than a week to understand that this may be true, you really could get used to anything, but also that life deteriorated when spent in the proximity of something you hated that much. It was exhausting; it wasn’t worth it.

If we are destined to lose certain things, wouldn’t it be better to do without them from the start? she wondered, not sure of the answer.

“You speak to people, but you don’t know who’s listening to you. But you come into their homes and make them happy anyway.” “I don’t know about happy, but they certainly feel like they have some company.” “Isn’t that the same thing?”

Ultimately, that was what he wished for everyone who came there— that each person would find a place where they could tend to their pain and heal their wounds. That place would be different for each one of them.

life decays, countless cracks form over time. But it was those very cracks, the fragility, that determined a person’s story; that made them want to keep going, to find out what happens next.

Yui came to understand that there was always joy somewhere within unhappiness. That inside each of us we preserve the fingerprints of those who taught us how to love, how to be both happy and unhappy in equal measure; of those who explained how to differentiate between feelings and how to navigate the overlap, the areas that make us suffer, but that also make us different. Different and special.

That even when we are confronted by the subtractions, the things that life takes from us, we have to open ourselves up to the many additions it can offer too.