I never want to be bound to anything. I always want to be able to come and go as I please.
The pain of having been so openly rejected was always with him. But now, like the tide, it ebbed and flowed. At times it flowed up to his feet, at other times it withdrew far away, so far away he could barely detect it.
Nothing comes of hatred.
People don’t just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they’ve received. I have only just learned that truth.
I’m safe inside this container called me. With a little click, the outlines of this being – me – fit right inside and are locked neatly away. Just the way I like it. I’m where I belong.
But I’m not dead. I just disappeared. I do that. I move into another world, a different world. Like boarding a train running parallel. That’s what disappearing is. Don’t you see?
Relax, let your guard down. You’re all tensed up so you always expect the worst. Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up.
To tell the truth, I don’t really understand the causes behind my runner’s blues. Or why now it’s beginning to fade. It’s too early to explain it well. Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about it is this: That’s life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on. Like taxes, the tide rising and falling, John Lennon’s death, and miscalls by referees at the World Cup.
Day after day I took part in producing nothingness. Perhaps I was quite used to facing nothingness day after day – though I wouldn’t go so far as to say we were intimate.
That sounds good. But I don’t like to be tied down in one place. I want to be free-to go to where I want, when I want, and be able to think about whatever I want.
It was a small soft hand. I thought my heart might break in two.
I am me and not me.
A person’s life may be a lonely thing by nature, but it is not isolated. To that life other lives are linked.
Habit, in fact, was what propelled his life forward. Though he no longer believed in a perfect community, nor felt the warmth of chemistry between people.
It’s like I’m spilt in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can’t catch her.
Sometimes people go through huge transformations,” Menshiki said. “They obliterate the style they’ve worked in, and out of the ruins they rise up again.
Realizing all over again how important sunlight is to human beings, I appreciate each second of that precious light. The intense loneliness and helplessness I felt under those millions of stars has vanished.
Even the darkest, thickest cloud shines silver when viewed from above.
No one noticed that I had changed- that I had given up sleep entirely, that I was spending all my time reading, that my mind was someplace a hundred years – and hundreds of miles – from reality.
The things that his death gave rise to are still there, bright and clear, inside me, some of them even clearer than when they were new.