regrets...

“I lay on the snow, looking up at the stars, and I could feel the earth turning beneath me. If you listened carefully, you could hear the groan and creak of pulley and rope, turning the earth and all the life that clings to it. In a single, vertigo heartbeat, it felt like I might slip off entirely and free-fall into nothingness.”
.....

“I knew a girl once. Her name, her name is not important now. She came to Japan from home and we spent our brief time together exploring Japanese cityscapes and countrysides. We hiked up a mountain in Gifu. Wandered the myriad streets of Tokyo. Snowboarded down pristine slopes in Nagano. We spent nights like this talking into the early morning. She drank a lot of beer and I listened to her stories. And then I awoke and made my way back to my real life. I left and she stayed, and that is pretty much where the story ends.

Sometimes I hate Japan. Or perhaps hate is too strong a word. But it has such a hold over me. Casts such a spell on my existence. And sometimes I fear that I have fallen off the earth. Maybe when people fall off the earth, it is into this half-life of quiet desperation that they land. Forever separated from the magic just over the horizon like a dream upon waking.

It was not that I was lovesick or heartbroken. It was just that on nights like this, under a full sky of stars, listening to the snow fall silently on empty slopes, on nights like this the mind turns naturally to a girl with dark hair and a warm smile. At night, when I dream, she is always laughing and turning into the sunlight. And I wake, feeling like a kite returning to earth because the wind on which it was sailing has passed.

A moon, half-empty, had possession of the sky. Distant stars like islands near at hand. I lay there almost till dawn, on a Japanese slope, turning the image of her over and over in my mind, like you might with a stone in your hand. The edges blur and the features rub away, until all you are left with are scattered recollections and a vague sense of loss. Not feelings, but the memory of feelings. Longing. Nostalgia. Regrets so sharp they make your chest hurt.”

-paraphrased in part from Will Ferguson's "Hokkaido Highway Blues". Where he ends and I begin, I will leave it up to you....