Try thinking of sleep as a kind of rebirth.

I wish someone would promise me that nothing is meaningless,” he said. “I wish there were promises worth believing in. That after we’ve been hunted and lonely and anxious and living in fear, there is something else. Considering the way we are living right now, if we were young at the end of our lives instead, then maybe our dreams could come true.

Back then, he and I were always waiting for each other.

Maybe if we hug a hundred strangers, he said, something will change.

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual – if one thinks about it, it’s really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn’t think things through.

You eat breakfast, then it’s lunch, and then it’s dinner, and when it’s bright again it’s breakfast again. It might have been better if I could have made different side dishes, but since the same things were planted in the fields, I always made the same panchan. If you do that over and over, there are times when you get so sick of it. When the kitchen felt like a prison, I went out the back and picked up the most misshapen jar lid and threw it as hard as I could at the wall.

Taking his hand and letting it go was my way of saying goodbye.

If there were no sea between you and me... there wouldn’t be this painful goodbye.

If I opened my mouth to say a single word, all of the other expired words would have followed and spilled to the ground, as if the string that held them together had snapped.

We each get one life that is our own. We each in our own way struggle to get ahead, love, grieve, and lose our loved ones to death.