Yu Miri

I never carried any photos with me, but I was always surrounded by people, places, and times gone by. And as I retreated into the future, the only thing I could ever see was the past.

The waves roared.

I stood alone in the darkness.

Light does not illuminate.

It only looks for things to illuminate.

And I had never been found by the light.

I would always be in darkness—

Time had slowed to a sluggish crawl. I walked faster, but each step plunged me deeper into the depths of stillness. If time could pass so slowly that its passage was imperceptible, then—is death where time stops and the self is left all alone in this space? Is death where space and the self are erased and only time continues?

I finished my drink while he was talking. Now that I had nothing left to drink, I felt uncomfortable—as if I was naked in front of him,

I was doing nothing wrong. The only thing I was guilty of was being unable to adjust. I could adapt to any kind of work; it was life itself that I could not adjust to. The pain of life, the sadness… and the joy…

I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there’s the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.

I was always tired.
There was never a time I was not tired.
Not when life had its claws in me, and not when I escaped from it.
I did not live with intent, I only lived.

nights when it rained, I couldn’t stop myself from listening to the sound, which kept me from sleeping. Insomnia, then eternal sleep—held apart from one by death and the other by life, brought closer to one by life and the other by death, and the rain, the rain, the rain, the rain.

at the same time I thought what a thing of sin poverty was, that there could be nothing more sinful than forcing a small child to lie.