faster than sound, quicker than light

18 Jul, 2025

you're an eternal optimist, so you get your heart broken easily. something's always hurting. it's been hard to speak lately. we haven't been here in a long time. you're fine — this is what you tell yourself, because you want it so badly to be true.

something true: you don't act like it, because you're obsessed with being good and strong, but everything stays with you. the day you held both of grandma's hands and didn't know it would be the last time you could. the night grandpa cut his scalp open and you stayed up making rice while they stitched him up in the emergency room. mom's face when she saw you hooked up to all the IVs in december, when you were the lucky sucker confined for an ulcer.

("take care of yourself, 'chi. you know i don't take care of you.")

every word of defeat tastes like metal on your tongue because you've sworn not to take anything for granted, and all things considered you're fine, you are, but you think, maybe, life has been really—

you're sick, again, and you still can't bring yourself to say it. always trying to drown your sorrows in silver linings. who would you be if you didn't wage war against melancholy? you've got new aches that weren't there before, a belly made of fire, and a heartbeat that treks across the single-plank bridge all night, leaves your breath for dead in the morning; some days you forget how much you like running.

you're digressing. you don't like writing in a way that's not driven by the sole purpose of releasing yourself from the confines of your own body. you're not good at it, either. let's stop talking about what hurts for a while. because all things return to brown-haired anime boys you stand beside and puff your chest out with— let's talk about oikawa tooru and his pseudo-fucked up knee. let's talk about haiji kiyose and his his actual fucked up knee.

imagine being seventeen and staring down a giant in the sendai city gymnasium because he doesn't believe you've sown roots deep enough to chase a ball halfway across the world without faltering. imagine being twenty-two and sitting in your doctor's office, picking lint off your first year joggers while he tells you the yomiuri shimbun building isn't your finish line. imagine being twenty-four and having nothing to show for it but your own blood on your hands. is this the worst time of your life? you don't know. who knows what happens once we round the corner?

you line yourself up next to these monsters not because you have any of their ambition or tenacity but because you fight tooth and nail to act like you do. how many of us actually get to do the things we say we will? historically speaking, desire is not a limited resource. but when you face yuki hayashi in the concert of life and he says 'we must go' you can only bend your knees and pray you've set aside enough to follow his lead.

pretend, for a moment, that july is not an incredibly dreary month during which we in the tropics pay heavily for the white man’s obsession with killing the planet. pretend you have not bled internally and that the world is not in fact collapsing into a black hole at the end of your esophagus. pretend you could go anywhere. be someone else. that none of your dreams go unconquered.

are you hearing it yet? your firecracker heart and your jackrabbit pulse taking off without you, singing: sorry it doesn't get easier. sorry, i can’t stay.

point being: we're going. everyone is in one way or another. do you remember? in third grade you saw meet the robinsons for the first time and decided you weren't going to skip the sad parts. if you were going to become anything you were going to become a robot with pennants and fortune slips that spelled out the words: keep. moving. forward. so pick yourself up. dust yourself off.

keep going, keep going.