Men Without Women

by Haruki Murakami

“Whether you want to or not. But the place you return to is always slightly different from the place you left. That’s the rule. It can never be exactly the same.”

at a certain point a lot of things didn’t seem like that big a deal anymore.

“To me, it’s a kind of sickness. Thinking about it doesn’t do much good.

All I can do is accept what they did and try to get on with my life.”

But the self that one returned to was never exactly the same as the self that one had left behind.