Chuo Line

I straightened up and looked out of the plane window at the dark clouds hanging over the North sky, thinking of what I had lost in the course of my life: times gone forever, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again.

Eighteen years have gone by, and still I can bring back every detail of that day in the meadow. Washed clean of summer's dust by days of gentle rain, the mountains wore a deep, briliant green. The October breeze set white fronds of head-tail grasses swaying. One long streak of cloud hung pasted across a dome of frozen blue. It almost hurt to look at that far-off sky. A puff of wind swept across the meadow and through her hair before it slipped into the woods to rustle branches and send back snatches of distant barking- a hazy sound that seemed to reach us from the doorway to another world. We heard no other sounds. We met no ohter people. We saw only two bright, red birds leap startled from the centre of the meadow and dart into the woods.

Even so, my memory has grown increasingly distant, and I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

Naoko and I saw each other exactly once after Kizuki's funeral. Two weeks after the event, we met at a coffee house to take care of some minor mattter, and when that was finished we had nothing more to say. I tried raising several different topics, but none of them led anywhere. And when Naoko did talk, there was a certain edge to her voice. She seemed angry with me, but I had no idea why. We never saw each other again until that day we happened to meet on the Chuo Line in Tokyo a year later.

*** (Disclaimer: not self-written, copied, taken from somewhere)

I am unexpectedly reminded of the Moonriver cafe on a Wednesday afternoon when I sit alone at the table in the cafe next to the see through window and an old man comes an sits next to me and asks if the homestyle fish is nice and i tell him that it is. he is a regular at the cafe for the staff knows him and he, them, and they are surprised that he does not go for the curry that day.