postlightning:

Two ageing laptop computers sitting on barstools beside the bed.

The older machine has a bigger screen;

The smaller screen shows brighter pictures.

I used to bring these things everywhere,

Now I find myself staying where they are.

I removed the ass and lap out of these equations

And put them on the bed,

Where now all my important things get done.

Now this is more like poetry. Also, so damn true. This = me.

Also… er… get a room?

Connections seem to be springing up everywhere. A few strands here and there, then ropes marking off a site. More and more, and soon there are fibrous walls enclosing us. I said once before that we make our connections in the past—unless we’re Takemoto and we narrate our future in the past.

I’m starting to make them in the present.

The kind we’re expected to make, the kind that doesn’t make us eligible for tragedy.

Let me be clear: when I last spoke of connections, I was referring to thematic connections that help us understand our lives. Not those lesser demons that spawn constantly from such things as education. That’s the kind I’ve been making, so I’m fine. Probably.

They’re making themselves, though.

I’m starting to recognizes huge swathes of my college peers, within my major—people I never thought I’d see again. I share classes with them. They talk to me. They remember me. I’m not anonymous. How strange.

I feel like I’m being closed in. As I blindly continue to spin my wheels in the ruts of yesterday, today’s experiences are glomming together and forming thick mud with which to flood the path.

Almost every conversation returns to the subject of another. In discussing autobiography, inevitably Facebook is mentioned, and with it, privacy and disclosure, and with that, I recall a buzz made the other day on the topic. What does a rhetoric class on narrative and imagery have to do with privacy policy and job recruitment? So much, apparently, so much that I cannot choose to ignore the connection.

Lectures past spring to mind; conversations past repeat themselves; arguments past continue to vie for validity.

Time moves more and more rapidly.

I guess chunking is real—and there we go, another connection. I can’t divorce Socrates from Philonous and Hylas, nor lies from lying from deception from confession from autobiography from creative nonfiction from writers write from tautology from Socrates is mortal—and all the way back around—, nor truth from Nietzsche from metaphor from Whorf from language from time from turning from Henry James from Dickinson from my own writing from Kant from Spinoza from infinite trollish internet jokes and—

and what?

Connections spiral out of control… “oh no / what’s this / a spider web”

We run in circles. We skirt issues, we circumnavigate the elephant in the room. We return to the same point again and again as what looks like a door in the distance turns out to be taped off with the yellow caution tape that is yet another connection. If we had scissors, could we break out?

…

In a dream last night, I knew I was dreaming. She was there—she and so many others—and I knew she wouldn’t want me to know she was. So I kept my head down when I felt her approach, I averted my eyes. Maybe she wouldn’t even notice me. A gaggle of people walked closer, passing by. We were in a meadow, but I had a bucket and a mop. I was cleaning up. How strange.

Several folks passed by, none paying any attention to me.

And then I could take it no longer—there she was, I knew, mere feet away, so close and yet so far, and maybe she would speak—and I raised my head and opened my eyes, and she was speaking, and our eyes met for a brief moment and she knew what I was doing mentally as I let myself see her:

I don’t remember what it was that I was doing. I just remember that she knew.

Her eyes reflected so much understanding that I don’t remember their color.

Spoilers for everything I’ve written, ever.

Rocks fall; all main characters die.
(I’m serious. Continue only if you don’t mind spoilers, or never plan to read any fiction I ever write.)

Why?

I’ve wanted for a while now to write something more Aria, more Amanchu!—more uplifting, at times empty, at times laden with positive messages. Failing that, something purely humorous. Yes, I’ve written funny things before. Sardonic blog posts designed to amuse through abrasion alone. Ironically tragic ‘creative nonfiction’ that lampoons anyone and anything in order to avoid taking itself too seriously.

Ideas for more pleasant textual endeavors flow endlessly through my brain.

But I never write them.

What I write instead are stories like the Hunter Chronicles. Nothing ever goes right for our heroes, who after uniting and enjoying each other’s company for a brief period are forced to part ways. They only ever meet again as enemies after one of them is possessed by a malicious entity bent upon the unnatural propagation of entropy. The first book leaves one of the two heroes fatally wounded and the other banished (ostensibly forever) to the inferno. Between points A and B, our unfortunate heroes accumulate a score of afflictions and a long record of failures.

What I write instead are stories like “For the Pen.” Our protagonist has failed so hard at everything he’s tried to do in his life that he is obnoxiously self-deprecating. He saves the life of someone who wants to die (accidentally!), in doing so signing a contract with nature that says “please take me and break me.” He and the man he saves try to fight off their fates. Meanwhile the world goes to hell, our protagonist looking on sadly and failing to do anything about it (despite having the power to intervene!).

What I write instead are stories like “The Last Season.” The main character, after seven years of wasting away in a ward for the terminally ill, re-enters the world of the living when her (undetermined and inconsistent) disease seems to have miraculously departed. After a year of building new friendships and new loves, the main character must be readmitted to the hospital. It is unclear if she will ever emerge again.

What I write instead are stories like Tundra of Heroes. The protagonist of each of the three parts faces tragedy. A tavern performer whose alcoholism is his escape from his memories is judged for his sins at the end of a long and bloody journey. An archaeologist whose obsession with his job has robbed him of his social and family life quietly passes far from home while talking to the ghost of his neglected wife. A fallen aristocrat turned psycho murderer joins an army that is invading his homeland in a last-ditch attempt at revenge, only to fail at everything in every way imaginable.

What. The. Fuck.

Seriously?

Seriously?

What is this obsession with failure and misery? It’s there in many of my favorite stories.

AIR sees a young girl slowly lose motor capability and speech as a thousand-year-old curse destroys her from within. 5 cm/s… well, I’ve said enough about that one. Millennium Actress, Simoun, Pale Cocoon, Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora, even Honey & Clover, even in the midst of whatever uplifting messages they may or may not carry—they all smell of tragedy.

Bleh.

So many ideas for iyashikei pieces, so many for humor, and yet all I write is this junk. Once I finish Tundra of Heroes, once I drive the last nails into the coffins of my unheroic protagonists, I promise: I am writing something wonderful.

(Up next, barring the need for more gut-spilling: a list of brief story ideas.)

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.