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.

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.

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.

say hello to someone,
who would appreciate your cheap poems,
your rigid shoulder,
your overcooked spaghetti,
your trying-too-hard voice
and linger on it at moonless nights
gratitude is an attitude

say hello to someone,
who keeps talking to you
even to your tombstone,
self-centeredness, dependency, addiction, obsession,
name it.

say hello, hug, kiss, hold, embrace,
walk beside, accompany,
soothe,
forgive, rebuke, be honest,
stay, insist, insist,
name it.

- H. Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

and wisdom, so I don’t ask when I’m supposed to seek, so I don’t seek when I’m supposed to just ask.

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

ps: this is one of my all-time favorites. I always go to this to remind myself every now and then of something. I wish everyone I care about may have balance in their lives, joy in a space shared with others, as well as with oneself.