Absolutely loathsome. I walked around picking up cicada corpses and buried them in the garden, pouring water over the earth.
It’s a lonely season, the kind where there’s no one to confide in.
A dry wind blows violently, leaving only solitude behind.
Even when I look up at the sky, I see nothing but clouds, and all I can do is mutter in a mosquito-like whisper, "It’s all over."
Ah. In the end, I sold this entire summer to alcohol.
Before I noticed, the town had wrapped itself in a thin veil, and the blue fruit had all turned pale pink.
People remain quiet amid the ashes, trying to cool down their fevered bodies.
Everything seems to have shattered from excessive thermal expansion.
Hey, you there—give me a cigarette.
You're trying to figure me out, like some kind of David Copperfield narrative. You want to know where I was born, which Pokémon I liked.
You’ll trace my story, unravel who I am, and make a spectacle of it.
But you’ve come too late.
I have no memories left.
I lost them long ago.
Just think about it.
Your life is finite. Too short to try everything.
There’s not enough time to stretch your feelers out to the ends of the earth.
Human time is fixed and non-elastic. That’s an objective fact.
And if the world were forever stuck at 7:37 a.m., would you even bother getting out of bed for school or work?
Maybe the concept of "I’ll do it tomorrow" would vanish, but maybe you’d keep saying "tomorrow" until you stopped doing anything at all—stopped caring about anyone or anything.
You’d just drift, vaguely alive.
Say something, won’t you?
I think it’s precisely because humans have physical limits, because life is finite, that we become distinct from one another.
It’s the endless choices within constraints that shape the self.
I believe that an invitation from infinity leads to the erasure of the individual—and once the individual vanishes, the concept of society disappears too.
Everything melts together into nothingness, and that repeats forever.
Can you hear it too? How many times has it been now?
The parade begins with the tolling of a bell that warns of a great storm.
Leading it is a massive float, reminiscent of Mount Fuji, bearing a statue of Guan Yu, pulled by two elephants draped in countless lanterns.
Around the float, men in topknots and women in twelve-layered kimono lead the way—people dressed as if they’ve stepped out of a Japanese painting.
Just behind them, you can spot Crusader helmets and cheongsams.
A man with a turban smiles at you from atop a flying carpet.
Curious? Go take a look. I’ll still be here.
If you keep walking south, you’ll circle the world and return from the north.
I wonder if I’ll still be here then.
Even if I die, the friction between the cells of my body will go on living forever.
But I have no body, and you have no shadow.
And yet, I desperately want to experience this moment again and again.
I’ll love everything I’ve ever seen and cross a thousand-year world just to see you again.
No matter how many times I repeat myself, I’ll start over each time. The power that wells up inside pushes me closer to my ultimate hope.
Can you hear this voice too?
"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you," they say.
How many times has it been now?
2020 VR, Poetry