Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

A Few Words in Retrospect

- A Few Words in Retrospect -

She had left me a letter. Just a few folded pieces of paper. Inconspicuous they were, sitting in the mailbox of my old apartment that I chanced to visit, along with a whole pile of other mail. Her handwriting is small and delicately etched, as though she had taken a great deal of time carving into wood. Each seems to come alive. Like moving little insects and they crawl into my heart. That day, I order my chai tea latte and sit down with this letter at the coffee shop, before I begin to read.

I have to first apologize for leaving you suddenly like that. I will do my best to explain how I felt and how I'm feeling, the turmoil in my mind and my final conclusions.

As I write this, I'm back in Tokyo, in my old apartment. As you might imagine, I have a hot cup of chai tea latte; I don't know when I would be able to have another. There's a pair of birds outside my window chirping. They remind me of you and I. The dawn is just breaking but it's entirely different from the way it looked at the top of the hill in the middle of the clearing. Those bright colours coming in from all around you like being baptized by something holy, but yet, you are completely unworthy. You ask why do I get to see this? It opens your eyes beyond the borders of your soul and for a while, everything is so at peace and in harmony with one another you wonder why the entire world can't be like this. Then suddenly you are free, flying over the tree tops, in sheer bliss and excitement. That's what it feels to me, I always had this connection. Yet I could never put it to words. I could never express how I truly felt. To you, or to myself. Not since after I had been taken in by them.

Suddenly, I was alone, cut off, like the flow of water had been suddenly removed, the spigot turned off. I was thirsty and left to dehydrate. The river of the Collective was gone from me. Something that had always been there unceasingly, sometimes infuriatingly present - this I took for granted. I had always heard the sounds around me and the hum of the greater absolute. But now everything is silent around me and the world is alien and unfamiliar. This Tokyo sunrise, is similar to that feeling, where things are bottled up and compacted, blocked off by a myriad of buildings, yet there are the colours up above, beyond, just that you can't see it or feel like you are part of it, bathed in it. There's the split between the grand beauty and the individual. The connection between the two is blocked off like a large stone lid.

Now this blockage is only what happens in my own self, in my inner world, consciously, that's what it feels like. These are all individual subjective instances, surely you have your own moments like that too in some capacity - you understand right? But what I wonder is, if our perception is canon? Is it conclusive and decisive? Are we truly blocked off from this beauty beyond? Aren't we still part of this world and a part of how things work? Perhaps we just can't see the connection personally even if it's there. We know and understand nothing else beyond our consciousness. Indeed, in my mind, the connection is all fading from view.

So allow me to be selfish and self-centered once again, let's say I must assume my perception as truth.

I know I've left you sooner than I should: I didn't want you to see me in my worst state. It's entirely my own choice and has nothing to do with you. I've always had an issue with how I am perceived by others. I've always heard all their thoughts and known what I believe is the objective truth. Back in high school, I felt as though I was bullied all the time because I had seen through their minds. I took it all seriously and personally. And then I met you and your mind. You taught me the self needed to grow, transform and change, that there's a journey regardless of what's around us. But the flaw in that, I've come to know, is that there is no such thing as an absolute disparity or blockage between self and the world. Even now when I thought I had been cut off from the world, it is a constant connection, a conversation back and forth.