Sam Bett

Just seeing you, though, I feel, I dunno, happamine.”

It was every face of Makiko I’d ever known—the one who laughed and cried with me, who ran up to greet me the second she saw me, who sat in the park in her uniform and rode off on her bike, who shut her eyes tight and cried through the entire wake, who took money straight out of her pay envelope to buy me new indoor shoes for school, who sat there, all alone, in her hospital bed after giving birth to her daughter, who was always there for me—every side of her was smiling now.

Nine winters ago—on the night of my twenty-fifth birthday, at a little after eleven, I decided to go out for a walk.

I’m not sure what gave me the idea, but as I sat there, watching yet another uneventful birthday coming to an end, I had the sudden desire to go out and walk around. Sure, it would probably have been nice to bring a cake home (my birthday is Christmas Eve, so the city was full of cakes), or have a conversation with somebody, but going for a walk was the only thing that came to mind that I could do on my own

I thought about the walk I took that winter on my birthday.

I remembered that night, how I counted the lights, walking through coldness so profound that I could almost hear it, through that dry air slickened with so many special things

“Um, do you think the light you’re thinking about and the light I’m talking about are, um, the same thing?”

“Of course they are,” Mitsutsuka said with a smile. “We’re talking about the same light.”

That’s why what matters is how you think about your work in your own lifetime, how much you respect it, how hard you’re trying.

People just want to read something about themselves

“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?”

I mean the ones who go around making absolutely certain they never challenge the men around them, or threaten their sense of superiority

The borders of my being gradually thinned, making me feel as if all kinds of things about me were in fact all kinds of things about somebody else. I stopped looking down.