This weekend I got a new book by my favorite author. He put out a book of short stories just recently. I was surprised because Kafka on the Shore came out only last year. Either way. I picked it up and it was more or less free.

Every time I read a new Murakami book, I find myself struck by lines in it. Struck right down into the very core of me, like the words themselves resonate in me, picking up the harmonics that I didn’t know words could hit. This is the reason he is my favorite author. The words strike me and I harmonize with them unintentionally.

So I started this book at lunch today, thinking I would get through the first short story, but I had only read a few pages in, when I was hit by one of the lines that Murakami so deftly plucks, causing the other strings within me to vibrate. The line took place at the end of a brief conversation in the book that needs a bit of lead in. A kid, 14 is asking his older cousin if he liked High School. The older cousin says not really, but he could always see his friends there. The kid then queries if he still sees them. He says no and the kid asks why. It was the reply that struck me:

”’Cause we live so far away from each other.” That wasn’t the reason, but I couldn’t think of any other way to explain it. ¹

Now perhaps this isn’t the full and complex explanation, but I think this is very true. I think we drift apart from people because we do live far apart. Distance isn’t always physical. I think that distance does not keep people apart; I think it is something more. However, most of the time, we just say that it is the distance.

I have always thought that I live very far away from people. As time goes on, you drift closer and further form some, separated not by distance but by substance. True substance of heart and mind and thought. I talk to very few people I talked to in High School and I consider none of them to still be my friends. Perhaps acquaintances. We have no substance between us. There is nothing to pull us back together from the distance that we have placed between us.

I do live very far apart from most people. I am a distant person. I won’t say untouchable, but perhaps something close to that. I wonder how many people live in this perpetual distance, this state of being far apart from everything. There are times when I feel so disconnected that I imagine myself the most distant of asteroids, unaffected even by the gravitational pull of the other celestial bodies.

I can say that I am very far away from the people I knew in my High School days and I don’t want to make any real effort to get closer. I may live on the other side of the country from where I grew up, but that is not what has pushed me so far out into space. I left without any intention of going back. I chose to go and burn that bridge. It was not the border between states that separated me from them when I left, but my very desire to go away. To turn my back.

This space is mine. I made it.

I am very far away and I have no intention of closing the distance.

Posted by Utopia at November 20, 2006 12:43 PM

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Posted by: vesper at November 20, 2006 05:06 PM

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