Goodbye Tsugumi

Sooner or later people are definitely going to give up if you don’t give them back as much as they’re giving you

Over the past few days I’ve written you a hell of a lot of letters. I’d write one and then tear it up and then start writing again. I don’t know why it has to be you, of all people. But for some reason I can’t help thinking that of all the people around me, only you can really read the meanings of the words I use, and understand what I’m saying.

For me the summer had been the concentrated essence of everything in the past that I loved and missed.

Summer is almost over.

This knowledge left us a little quieter than before. For a moment I found myself wishing, really wishing that Tsugumi’s clothes would never ever dry, that our fire would never die.

On nights like this when the air is so clear, you end up saying things you ordinarily wouldn’t.

She was lovely, wonderfully pure. I bet she thought no one knew how easily she cried.

It didn’t matter if I was a kid or a grown-up. The old woman next door might have just died, the local doctor might have just had a baby, or I might be on my first date or have fallen out of love—none of this made any difference at all to the ocean; it remained just as it was, fanning out around the edge of our town and zooming quietly off into the distance, the tide rising and falling just as it always did, no matter what.

It’s a marvelous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent. You never get tired of watching it. And no matter how rough the waves get, you’re never bothered by the noise the water makes or by the commotion of the surface—it never seems too loud, or too wild.

This meant that for a while we both became extraordinarily sensitive to the ringing of our phone.

For me the summer had been the concentrated essence of everything in the past that I loved and missed.