All the Lovers in the Night

It was bizarre to witness such vividly painful emotions, profound enough it felt like I could touch them, transform so completely.

In all those years of doing whatever I was told to do, I had convinced myself that I was doing something consequential, in order to make excuses for myself, as I was doing right now, and perpetually dismissed the fact that I’d done nothing with my life, glossing over it all. I was so scared of being hurt that I’d done nothing. I was so scared of failing, of being hurt, that I chose nothing. I did nothing.

It occurred to me that maybe I was where I was today because I hadn’t chosen anything

I wondered what had brought about this awful state of mind. Why did I have to feel so awful all the time? How had I let things get so bad that I was unable to do work or anything else?

Even so, I continued to put this food that didn’t matter into my body that didn’t matter, which made everything seem to matter even less

and every time Mitsutsuka touches me, it sends a new wave crashing through the warm liquid that our bodies are immersed in, so that more than once I feel as if I’m drifting out of consciousness. Overcome by how refreshing and soothing it can be to stare into the eyes of somebody you feel this way about, to be this close to them, as if you’re being remade from the deepest parts of you

My head spins with a pleasure so intense it feels like I can barely hold it all inside, amazed that skin pressing against skin could feel this way, at how absorbing body heat—not with the fingers but with the full breadth of the belly or the back—can make it feel as if you’re sharing everything there is to share

“We regret the things we don’t do more than the things we do.”

There’s no way you could approach everything in life with the same attitude, because that’d be total nonsense

“Doesn’t that wear you down a little? To keep looking for something you’ve decided is definitely there, when you can’t really say for sure?”