>>5924072You really love that movie. You can’t pin down what it’s about. But you can feel what it’s meditating on in the pit of your stomach, a visceral thing swirling around in your stomach that you could know but not identify. The idea that life goes on so long as you allow it, and it ends when you won’t. A morally neutral choice: Let your life end here and now at its natural conclusion, or live on in the hopes of finding new life. To be judged impartially in that decision, no moral questions about cowardice or forgiveness. It was okay to live, or it was okay to die. Either choice presented as an emanation into new life regardless. Move on from heartbreak and revenge so as to achieve rebirth in this realm, or move on from life itself to achieve rebirth in another.
Or maybe you were wrong, and you just-
“Is that the boring, stupid movie again?” Masami asks you, standing in the doorway to your bedroom. She did that a lot these days.
“It’s not stupid, it’s just not written for stupid people.” You retort, reciting the words you knew on instinct to say, but not reflecting their playful spirit in your somber tone. Staring at her. While you’re bantering you’re still in an existential fugue, trying to look into Masami and beyond her. If she were a movie, what would it be about? What was the character of Masami’s soul?
“You said it, not me: It’s not stupid but it IS boring.” She says. Your piercing, analytic gaze seems to affect her then. Her face begins to turn red. “Um… Anyway…” she says, leaving hurriedly to go do, who knows, something. Whatever it was Masamis do.
You imagine that Masami didn’t really think much of herself, and so she was envious and scared of other people. That she was driven by a fundamental angst that she couldn’t define. An angst that felt like an unspoken, vulnerable truth that couldn’t be revealed without grave threat of personal harm to her, the desire to be good enough, the sneaking suspicion that you could NEVER be good enough. That baked in knowledge that anyone who could see what a weak, insubstantial thing you really are, they could never love you. And the pained hope, the secret longing for a moment where you can experience a sacred light from another person who could look upon you and see you without judgment. To recoil from being seen and to avoid it on a primal level, but still desperately hope to feel an echo of a god’s love and mercy from another fallen creature.
You stand and shut the door.
Your shrine, your now well-used television set. Small bathroom. Small mirror.
You contemplate Otomo Mizutani. He stares into your eyes and you stare into his.
His eyes are pools of water, swirling. A great ocean that gently breaks ships, passing broken pieces this way and that way, touching them all over with the calm caress of the tide, endlessly pulling and tugging down and in, down and in, ever deeper.
