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# 12 SPRING #
Myojo 2007.06



It has really become spring by now. Coats and knit sweaters have vanished from my wardrobe. Outside the trees are full of cherry blossoms, and I get warm inside just by looking at them, I'm really someone who has a weakness for these signs that the seasons are changing. And this year, I caught a cold too, as usual. It was a very bad cold, with high fever going on for days. For me who rarely gets a high fever, I finally realized "This is what a true cold is like!" while falling asleep. When I look at the colds I had one by one, the symptoms have become worse and it takes longer for it to heal. In this nineteenth spring of my life I keenly felt what it means to become older.

When springtime comes, though I get warm feelings inside, I start to miss other people. This surely is because this is the season where you have to say goodbye to others when you graduate from school, and when the time comes to enter a new school, you meet new people. Spring, a short period that brings both meetings and partings. Maybe that's why I end up thinking of a heartrending kind of love when it's time for this season. Not only the kind that bears fruit, but the kind of love which makes me feel overcome with emotions. Even if I say this though, I can't remember having fallen in love in spring. But when I get warm inside, when my gaze falls on the cherry blossoms, for some reason I am filled with heartrending sorrow, that is what spring is like for me. Since I ended up feeling that way too this spring, I'd like to write about love this time.

There is no word like "setsunai" [note: I translate it as heartrending or heartbroken] in English. I heard this before from someone. When you look up the word "setsunai" in a Japanese-English dictionary, you find it translated as "sad", but when you look up the word "sad" in an English-Japanese dictionary, you get the translation "kanashii". So setsunai = kanashii. Is that really true? I think that "kanashii" expresses a more simple emotion. You're sad because you lost something you treasured, you're sad because the pet you kept died, you're sad because someone who was important to you died. All the more because there is an easily distinguishable difference in the level of this emotion, "kanashii" is a very straight and easy to understand emotion. You can't deny that it is a feeling that everyone is able to sympathize with. "Setsunai" is not such a simple thing. You feel heartbroken because the person you love already has a lover, you feel heartbroken because you are in love with someone who will never love you back... it's such a complicated feeling. Something you cannot express in words grips your heart, you choke on it, you suffer and suffer. This must be the feeling of "setsunai", I think. Maybe it isn't something that you experience a lot of times in your life.

I did experience it, this heartbreaking kind of love. At that time, I was still a very normal middle school boy. Someday my girlfriend suddenly broke up with me, and no matter how many times I asked her, she just wouldn't tell me why. The next day I learned that my best friend now had a girlfriend since a month ago. Without saying anything I panicked, went home and cried my eyes out to the point that I thought I would wither and die. Because the girlfriend that my best friend was dating was my former girlfriend who had broken up with me. Apparently he had heard from her that she had broken up with me, but us both being guys we had never talked about love before, and it felt as if I had realized it too late. I tried to forget her with all my might, but I couldn't. On the way back from school I often saw the two of them being all lovey-dovey, and when I went to karaoke with friends, I would often meet the two of them coincidently, and everytime I became heartbroken. The girlfriend I had loved so much was with my best friend who I treasured so much. There was no room for me. I just couldn't blame them, so I blamed myself and closed my eyes to reality.

By now this is a memory. A page in the book of my youth. It was painful, but I don't want to forget what I felt at that time. I wonder if I will have my heart broken again in the time to come. A love that reduces me to a pathetic mass of tears, even though I'm a man. The nineteenth spring of my life, where I thought that no matter how old I get, I want to stay as sensitive as I am.

Translated by riccichan

* Do not repost/retranslate w/o permission *

Labels: Kato Shigeaki, ROCK STAR