walking on a dream, chasing shooting stars

She looked off into space, the sweet smile playing on her lips. It feels strange somehow, she said. Like none of it really happened. Oh, it happened all right. But now it's gone. Does it make you sad? No, I said, shaking my head. There was something that came it of nothing, and now it's gone back to where it came from, that's all. We fell silent again. What we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. Yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past. And I would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness.

All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.

From out of those words, these of hers: There is no middle ground with me. No middle-ground objects exist, and where there are no such objects, there is no middle ground.

She shook her head slowly. Charming lines appeared at the corners of her eyes; she looked as if she were recalling some far-off scene from the past. "Hajime, you can't tell anything from photographs. They're just a shadow. The real me is far away. That won't show up in a picture." The photograph brought a pain to my chest. It made me realize what an awful amount of time I had lost. Precious years that could never be recovered, no matter how much I struggled to bring them back. Time that existed only then, only in that place. I gazed at the photo for the longest time.