All the Lovers in the Night

“It’s not like I want people to hate me. I’m just not about to go out of my way to make them like me, either. Being liked is wonderful and all, but that’s not what life is about, you know?”

what if all the things that we can’t remember are actually the most important ones?

People just want to read something about themselves.

Their so-called spirituality is completely self-serving, designed to make them happy, or make the people around them think they’ve found some kind of happiness. It’s this shallow belief in immediate profit. They go around talking about seeing something big. As if everything they feel, everything they’re thinking, is so big, bigger than all of us. That’s what they do. They act like they’re all big, ready to share their happiness with everyone, when the only happiness they care about is their own. Like, why can’t they just keep all that stuff to themselves and leave the rest of us alone?

Why does the night have to be so beautiful?
As I walk through the night, I remember what Mitsutsuka said to me. “Because at night, only half the world remains.”

I gathered some observations into an email, which I polished to a diamantine sheen, then spent two more days reading over, until I had some drinks and clicked send with abandon.

“It’s like they say, trust is a two-way street. Reliance can be one-sided, though. Know what I mean? One side depends on the other. That’s not a partnership. And that’s why relationships based on reliance are pretty unstable. One little hiccup and everything could disappear.”

Haven’t you always done your best with whatever you were up against? Haven’t you given it your all, whatever came your way? Unfortunately, no. That’s not how things had been for me. I had faked it the whole way. In all those years of doing whatever I was told to do, I had convinced myself that I was doing something consequential, in order to make excuses for myself, as I was doing right now, and perpetually dismissed the fact that I’d done nothing with my life, glossing over it all. I was so scared of being hurt that I’d done nothing. I was so scared of failing, of being hurt, that I chose nothing. I did nothing.

It made my head sway, and my breath grew deeper as my legs climbed up that evanescent staircase, each step a sheet of light. They would shimmer to life the second my sole made contact, then fizzle into stardust when I lifted my foot, only to be reborn as yet another step, gently showing me the way.

I felt as though now that the heat and the sun had abated, the edges of everything around me had blurred. And while I could still clearly hear the sound of my own heart, it sounded strange to me, as if it wasn’t coming from inside, but from some other place altogether.