She worked with total dedication until her late twenties. She met many people through her work, and several men showed interest in her, but their relationships proved short and shallow. Nutmeg could never take a deep interest in living human beings. Her mind was filled with images of clothing, and a man’s designs had a far more visceral impact on her than the man himself ever could.
When she turned twenty-seven, though, Nutmeg was introduced to a strange-looking man at an industry New Year’s party. The man’s features were regular enough, but his hair was a wild mass, and his nose and chin had the hard sharpness of stone tools. He looked more like some phony preacher than a designer of women’s clothing. He was a year younger than Nutmeg, as thin as a wire, and had eyes of bottomless depth, from which he looked at people with an aggressive stare that seemed deliberately designed to make them feel uncomfortable. In his eyes, though, Nutmeg was able to see her own reflection. At the time, he was an unknown but up-and-coming designer, and the two were meeting for the first time. She had, of course, heard people talking about him. He had a unique talent, they said, but he was arrogant and egotistical and argumentative, liked by almost no one.
- Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
The part in which he describes the man, it blew my mind away that I had to quote it.
Some people iron white shirts when they’re anxious,
Some grow roses.
My neighbor polishes his orange city-bike,
My brother wrinkles his forehead.
Between crashes
I quote letters,
of desperate poets
and tipsy duets
of suicidal painter
in melancholic whisper
of grey weather
loving sunny blister
and I die
crushed like a pie.
If there’s one thing I would not like to dramatize, it would be death of a loved one. Let alone romanticize. But the thing about death is, no matter how prepared you think you are, it always stings you at the back of your neck right at the moment you’re fully-engaged with the thoughts and speculation of how prepared or how unprepared you are. One moment you’re absorbed with yourself, the next moment life was knocking at your door with a grief-stricken news, a definite portion of bitter reality.
Another thing about death, it becomes more and more real by the time it leaves the present. Memory takes shape of everything around you in replacing the absence and loss, easily evoked by fragrance, photographs, a corner of a room, a corner of no room, a song, even a void. It takes form of all the furnitures in a room you used to share with that a particular couch becomes the embodiment you consider to get rid of. You wish you wouldn’t have memory, you wish memory died along with the buried, you wish you died along. You need to hold on to memory although you know it gives you pain, some kind of a strange pain – when chanelled properly through immaculate practice – turns into some kind of pleasure. Pain yet pleasure, pleasure but all pain.
The thing about death maybe, I have to personalize it somehow. It has to be romanticized. I have to make sense of it to no or little avail. A mother of a truly good friend of mine had just passed away today. She bravely fought cancer for years, after being diagnosed with severe cervical cancer several years after her husband died. There must have been a relief well-mixed with grief at the same time. All of a sudden I just felt terribly exhausted that I just drowned myself in bed. As I heard the news, it struck me like lightning. Or maybe there was a lightning, I could barely tell.
It’s one of the things I like to do in life. Like really really like. Maybe that’s why I really like this film that I’ve seen it 5 times already and this music video. Having a roadtrip is inspiring to me, despite the mundane scenes of cows grazing and electric poles.
The idea of leaving someone for his/her own sake. That’s probably the most ridiculous pseudo-sacrifice bulls*it I’ve chosen to have strong opinion against. You leave because you have dreams to chase or a dream which keeps on chasing you, you grow tired of staying on the same ground, riding the same unfulfilled desire or simply despising a particular city. You leave because you can’t help but wonder about what the other side of the fence is like. It’s never for other’s sake but your own. You leave because you need to chase, you need to know your limit, you need to gain surprises far from the back of your hand, you need another sphere, you need to stand on your own, you need a slap of a wintry wind. You don’t leave for other’s sake. You just don’t, stop foolishly justifying yourself. Leaving the one who loves you is as selfish as suicide, as well-planned and enjoyable as a picnic, as necessary as a root. You leave because you can and it’s a manifestation of power. Given that option, you’ll do it countless times.
