アイ

Ai(Love)

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I don’t believe in love because I can’t see it
That’s what I’ve been telling myself up to this point

I simply buried it far, far away
But now you came into my life

I touch your hand and your heart
Just one second stretches into eternity like magic
You cry, then smile
My heart was missing a piece, look, it begins to tremble

Now my ordinary days are colored with love
I had been searching for you from the start

The distant, distant and freezing sky
Grows dim with loneliness even though I’m with you

I care for you but I’m afraid
Even now it seems you could vanish into thin air like a dream
Look at me and softly smile
Remind me that even when I close my eyes I can feel your warmth

I touch your hand and your heart
Just one second stretches into eternity like magic
You cry, then smile
One love slowly fills my heart now until it overflows

~ Motohiro Hata

The Fifth Season

It's spring but chill still
Snowing after two and a half years
From a belief that I had,
I placed you in the container
Of love and sorrow
The lid never comes off
I wanted it to be snowing inside of me
And never melt there

But every time you're near
You stir my heart again
Now I'm losing my sense of seasons
I know it's love

It’s overflowing
It’s overflowing

I hear clock ticks louder than usual
The summer went away faster than I thought
Engraved your name on this song

But every time you're near
You stir my heart again
Now I'm losing my sense of seasons
I know it's love

It’s overflowing
It’s overflowing

Chilly fall is peeling my feelings
I murmur that vow
I made to myself and asked
The moonless night to lead you away from me
But even they failed to
Change your color to me

The winter pretends it's mild and holds me
A cutting wind carries and rewinds you around me
My steps go nowhere
I scratched it from my memory
And try to approach the next season

But every time you're near
You stir my heart again
Now I'm losing my sense of seasons
I know it's love

It’s overflowing
It’s overflowing

It’s overflowing
Because you’re everything I need
It’s overflowing
Now make me right again
It's overflowing

~ Akanishi Jin [Yellow Gold Tour 3011 DVD]

Normally, there is your life, and you turn on the television and there is news, and no matter how grave it is, or how deep in the toilet the world has fallen, or how relevant the information might be to your own existence, your life remains a separate entity from the news. You still have to wash your underpants during a war, don’t you? And don’t you still have to fight with your loved ones and then apologize when you don’t mean it even when there’s a hole in the sky burning everything to a crisp? Of course you do. As a rule, there’s no hole big enough to interrupt this interminable business of living, but there are exceptions, grim instances in the lives of a few select unlucky bastards when the news in the papers and the news in their bedrooms intersect. I tell you, it’s a daunting and appalling moment when you have to read the newspapers to find out about your own struggle.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Darkness is boring and surprisingly brown.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

I learned that detaching is easy. Retreat? Easy. Hiding? Dissolving? Extraction? Simple. When you withdraw from the world, the world withdraws to, in equal measure. It’s a two-step, you and the world. I didn’t look for trouble, and it wore me down that none found me. Doing nothing is as tumultuous for me as working on the floor on the New York Stock Exchange on the morning of a market crash. It’s how I’m made. Nothing happened to me in three years and it was very, very stressful.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don’t have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don’t have to leave anything viable jutting from the base of your best friend’s spine, and afterward you can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won’t hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging yin your closet while you lie to yourself that it’s probably not the drowning man’s size. That’s how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world’s problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men and America, but there is no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that’s the source of our descent, and it doesn’t start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

In short, I’m a sweetheart, but I’m cold about it.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

All I could do was uselessly shake a clenched fist and think how people are so eager to become slaves it’s unbelievable. Christ. Sometimes they throw off their freedom so quickly, you’d think it was burning them.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

I looked over the terrifying drop and the my stomach lurched and all my joints locked and I had the following horrible thought: You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, that experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel and infinite loneliness. We don’t know what death is. Maybe it’s that.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Then I started thinking about tears. What was evolution up to when it rendered the human body incapable of concealing sadness? is it somehow crucial to the survival of the species that we can’t hide our melancholy? Why? What’s the evolutionary benefit of crying? To elicit sympathy? Does evolution have a Machiavellian streak? After a big cry, you always feel drained and exhaust and sometimes embarrassed, especially if the tears come after watching television commercial for tea bags. Is it evolution’s design to humble us? To humiliate us?

Fuck.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Not much gets past you, I’ll bet. No, I won’t use that hackneyed phrase that you remind me of myself when I was a boy, because, frankly, you don’t. You remind me of myself now, as a man, in jail, and it’s pretty frightening for me to be able to make that comparison, Martin, don’t you think? Considering, well, you’re just a kid.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Just because I’m here for life doesn’t mean I won’t be out one day. Life doesn’t really mean life. It’s just a figure of speech. It means an eternity which is shorter than life, if you know what I mean.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

You don’t want to be regular Joe. You just have to look out a window and see. I’ll tell you what’s out there: a bunch of slaves in love with the freedom they think they have. But they’ve chained themselves to some job or another, or to a squad of rug rats. They’re prisoners too, only they don’t know it.

A Fraction of the Whole

That’s the way of life for us boys. It would shake the foundations of common folk, but we have to be tough and prepared to live against the wall with our eyes blazing and our fingers twitching. After a while it becomes an unconscious act, you know. You develop a sixth sense. It’s true. Paranoia makes a man evolve. Bet they don’t teach you that in the classroom! Precognition, ESP, telepathy – we criminals have prophetic souls. We know what’s coming even before it happens. You have to. It’s survival mechanism. Knives, bullets, fists, they come out of the woodwork. Everyone wants your name on a headstone, so on your toes, boys! It’s a cunt of a life! But there are rewards.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Some people are body-and-soul repulsed at being a figure of pity. Others, such as me, can soak it up greedily, mostly because having pitied themselves for so long, it seems right that everyone else is finally getting on the bandwagon.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz