I think I’ve had maybe two days of truly good feelings and exuberant productivity in the last two weeks. That’s pretty lame. It’s not even November yet!

The other night, I realized that it’s been a month since I posted my Aika face. At the time, I thought I’d made a breakthrough. Things were going to change. Get better. Illusions would be dispelled, truths would be clarified, and steps would lighten. Would not the whole world seem more appetizing? A delicious treat waiting to be devoured?

I licked my lips, I waited to want the world.

I waited.

I waited.

This is a kind of waiting that I do not feel is wholly inappropriate. There is nothing to it aside from waiting, no promises or strings or expectations. Kind of like waiting for no one at a train station.

But while it’s the kind of waiting I find ‘acceptable,’ it is not particularly easy.

(Nothing should be easy!)

But I can’t sing that I’ll wait, I’ll wait, I’ll wait, I’ll wait—that, while a kind of waiting I’m far better at, would be inappropriate. It’s a dedication and a commitment. It’s an unfounded and unreasonable pining. One for which the waiter should need permission.

The narrative is, as a housemate commented, making itself clear.

An arc of my life.

With every post, I can find more previous posts to link together. Cohesion is manifesting. Sense can be made of my ramblings. Are you reading this? Or are you too distant?

A new week. Another Monday.

Starting tomorrow, I will make a renewed commitment to positif thinking, to energetic productivity, to Mizunashii Mode, to staying upbeat. For whom? For me, of course. But also for you, in case I’m not just standing outside the train station.

I’ll pass on projecting too much of Shinkai upon myself.

We’re reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions in a class I’m taking on autobiography. It was my second time reading the text for a class, and I did not do it justice on this read-through… though maybe that is justice, given that it’s a steaming pile of crap. But putting that aside, two interesting things came up in our discussions.

First, mortality.

Augustine grieves for a friend who dies—prior to his conversion, obviously. God doesn’t die.

The not-very-subtle narrative points toward a “necessary connexion” here: not wanting to love things that will die, Augustine becomes a bit closer to seeking out the heavenly yoke.

Second, location.

Augustine struggles with deciding where and what God is.

He doesn’t attempt to tie in any “witty” narrative techniques or implications, but here I swoop in like Batman to set things right. Check this!

1. People are in one place or another.
2. Person A might be in one place.
3. Person B might be in another.
4. They are not in the same place.
5. If Person A loves Person B, he loves something distant.
6. God is omnipresent.
7. If Person A loves God, he can love something nearby!

As Person A, I think it’s high time I converted…

Byousoku 5 Centimeter is an immortal film for me. I can watch it anywhere, anytime, and it will have value. Depending on my mood, and depending on my company, I will have different reactions to it. Sometimes I will laugh at how bathetic Tohno Takaki is—at the age of thirteen, upon having his first kiss in the midst of a hormonal Rage, he has a Moment of Clarity and casts divination. And suddenly he gains the divine foresight to know that once he returns to Tokyo to complete the move to Kagoshima, his relationship with Akari will fall apart.

Hilarious, on multiple levels.

But sometimes, that same scene under the same tree in the same snow (“Isn’t it like cherry blossom petals?”, to invert a line from the movie)—sometimes, it pulls at my heart.

Upon completion of the movie, something that happens a handful of times per year, I find myself mulling over a complicated problem. How does it manage to affect me? I know the premise is silly; I know Takaki is melodramatic; I know he smiles at the end; I know none of it matters that much. A long-distance relationship in middle school ends, and Takaki’s life is ruined. The hell? Yet sometimes—more often than not—nay, always, the film does move me.

I guess I can relate to Takaki on some levels.

Distance sprawls across this country like thousands of miles of manifest destiny, and it separates me from a girl who exists in my head. She exists in real life, ostensibly—her Facebook profile gets updated from time to time—but mostly she exists in my head. In a sort of Akari-sitting-on-a-hill-watching-the-sunrise way.

“Tohno wasn’t looking at me,” says Kanae.

I’m looking through you.

All of you. Sorry, folks. Surprised? Probably not.

I don’t write text messages that I don’t send. I don’t write e-mails that I don’t send. I don’t open chat windows, only to close them without having typed anything. Okay, so I totally do do that last one. But people are silly. Takaki can’t write Akari another letter after he loses his first copy to the train station wind. Akari can’t hand Takaki her letter, instead choosing to summarize her thoughts with the last line she’d written: “you’ll be fine.”

“You’ll be fine.”

That’s essentially what I was told by the girl to whom I confessed in December 2007. It was apologetic. I said “thank you.” I had already seen the first part of 5 cm/s, but of course I didn’t make any connection at the time. Connections and analogies are made in the past, right?

Unless you’re Tohno Takaki.

Then you make all your connections in the present, and you narrate your future in the past. Then you’re Honey & Clover’s Takemoto. And now we’re dealing with nostalgia and tragedy. Tragedy. Nostalgia.

“All I wanted was to move forward,” says Takaki.

I’ve never been quite so desperate as he. Nor so melodramatic. But one day my girlfriend of three years seventeen months explained to me why she’d fallen in love with another man: I felt distant to her. “Even if we’d exchanged a thousand text messages, our hearts wouldn’t grow one centimeter closer.” She didn’t say that, but maybe I’m more like Takaki than I ever expected.

Open your eyes.

Always, I want to be with you.

5 cm/s is thematically similar to that 80’s synthpop song I posted two weeks back. And to the crown jewel of Evanescence’s musical career, “My Immortal.” Erasure—Evanescence—and then the new tsunami which washes everything way: Niitsu Makoto.

Takaki creates an Akari in his imagination. In so doing, he foils one of Descartes’s two proofs for the existence of god. (The imagined Akari is clearly more perfect than the real Akari, so the real god might be less perfect than the imagined god, so he doesn’t have to exist, etc.)

Takaki always wants to be with Akari, to make believe with her, to live in harmony.

And Evanescence? Come on. The connection practically writes itself.

I’m so tired of being here, suppressed by all my childish fears
And if you have to leave, I wish that you would just leave
Your presence still lingers here and it won’t leave me alone

When I rewatched 5 cm/s the other day, I asked myself if I wasn’t guilty of some of the same sins as Takaki. When I rewatched it again this morning, I told myself I almost certainly was.

Why didn’t Takaki reach out to Akari? Why didn’t he keep trying?

Well, why didn’t I reach out? Why didn’t I keep trying?

“People are afraid to hope.” I could leave you with a vague answer like that, but I think there’s more going on here. Specifically, I think the theme of this blog is coming up, and thus needs mentioning: enryoshimashita. Takaki. I. We figured we’d pass. We didn’t want to ask for too much. We didn’t want to impose. So we refrained, we held back.

Is saying “No, Thank You!” a bad idea?

I’ll pass on answering that question.