The Depth of Gratitude: On Love, the Unconscious, and Affliction
Archive III. "to all the angels we met in this life——are you well?"
Living under a kindred stream of consciousness and meta-cognitive intensity as Simone Weil’s insights, while embracing life with a total opposite spiritual approach—finding truth and purification through connection and relational love instead of detachment and void.
Cover Image © You Lie in April (四月は君の嘘)
UNSEEN, UNSPOKEN (Based on a real-life conversation, Nov. 11)
"My brother is no longer with us."
"When?"
"This July."
"Was it an accident?"
She shakes her head.
"He took his life," she said, a voice so low.
Is that what she just said?
That sound of suicide.
"Concussion. A child dead in his arms. Sixteen different medicines. Depression. His liver is failing."
"People who don’t know him can hardly imagine."
Those moistened eyes carried so much grace.
A stream of silence. What could be said, when "I am sorry for your loss" in that moment degrades into a useless form of expression—
a societal norm, an emotion never fully felt.
Are the limits of empathy being hit?
Is giving one’s attention to a sufferer truly a miracle?
"Please never let this get you down."
"He is in a better place now."
The last thing she said before she left the room.
"Take care."
The tear that wells up in the left eye, minutes after—
Is the sincerity present? Or a simple mechanism?
Or is it from having suffering acknowledged,
a sense of belonging long lost,
a sympathetic cry of souls who have both touched the edge of existence?
How could any condolence ever be enough,
when all that can be done
is to weep in silence,
in a room you are no longer in,
alongside this prose that will never be sent,
where genuineness only resides in passive encounters.
When all love in this world
can only truly fulfill itself
in places never seen.
How much beauty can still be found in this seemingly breaking world,
how grateful could one be,
deep in the heart,
when she shared,
and he listened.
— 2025
"Why those encounters happened, the pain they bring, the scars they produce, the love they shattered. How many times, with overwhelming heaviness in the chest, did we tell ourselves: such is the cost of beauty, such are the things destined."
— 2025
"We know it’s real when the thing we wrote is hard even for us to carry—when its only place of existence is in the realm of witness, where the self is no more and shatters under the weight of the words."
— 2025
"Beauty and humility, perfectly coexist."
— 2025
She said, "I am like your mama, and you are like my papa. Isn’t that what our love feels like?"
He said, "No one can stay a child or a parent forever, I wonder."
"そうですね. My love and my guardian, how much I long to be cared for by you, and to care for you."
— 2025
"Without gratitude, the mind longs to own. With your face, the disillusioned world renders itself real once again."
— 2025
"That day, you suddenly turned to a 14-year-old kid
and told them
'好きです'
right before class.
That kid, who was secretly holding someone else in their heart,
looked at you in shock
and unknowingly responded with utter silence.
Did that silence hurt you?
Did that response become unbearable?
ごめん。ごめん。
Minutes passed.
It became so quiet.
'It was a joke,' you later said,
with a gentle push on the shoulder.
Those direct exchanges of gaze—
has it shown a distance or a vow?
Did your heart ever let you know,
deep in that kid’s eyes,
in those few minutes of silence as they looked at you
and in the moment they turned away,
they were telling themselves
with a not-yet-weathered heart
so unswervingly.
'I’ll use the rest of my life to protect you from harm.'
That they still carefully cherish
a glimpse of your soul at that age,
to this day."
(2015, “A 14-Year-Old’s Silence”)
— 2026 version
"‘Jier! I saw Susu today,’ she said,
having caught a glimpse of me standing on the bus,
gently poking me on the side of the waist like she used to.
‘For real? I saw her the other day as well.’
These words slipped out to Shéshé,
instinctive like a child,
with a tone somehow foreign to how we used to speak.
Did we both notice how much Susu had changed?
Or were we just pretending everything was still the way it was,
for one last time.
But neither of us knew—
that moment marked the end of childhood,
the days that truly felt real and pure,
for the three of us."
(2014, "The Three of Us")
— 2026 version
"Those memories—we write them down to protect them from fading away, to carry them in our hearts, and to remember that life has always been beautiful."
— 2026
"Read those words from the heart, and forget about us, so you have a place to rest your soul—so near unto us."
— 2025
"The degree of innocence, too often, is the degree of moral gravity they unknowingly carry from the party who inflicted the irreversible harm."
— 2026
"Could someone who has never touched the sincerity of their own heart ever see the sincerity of others?"
— 2025
"They nearly erased themselves in pursuit of purity—not out of innocence, for they knew too clearly the cost of living in a world without it, where necessity disguises itself as the genuine, where the experience of love becomes impossible."
— 2025
"If they could make someone feel so purely loved, then what does it matter if the world calls them a villain? If the world chooses to hate and tether the ones who remain to love under affliction, is it truly their love the world despises—or simply a purity and degree of innocence that the world could never bear to hold?"
— 2025
"You will not find their self in their body and soul; you will find everybody in it."
— 2025
"Two ways humans utilize truth:
truth serves one’s own survival;
or one serves the truth in spite of one’s survival."
— 2025
"We don’t change how a bird or a worm sees the world; nature does."
— 2025
"They apologize for failing to give you attention they deem meaningless, for they will apologize to the universe even more deeply for giving such attention."
— 2025
"Without the desire for the highest good and for love, we inevitably fall into cycles of survival and self-interest, a gradual deprivation of all beauty."
— 2025
"How scared and pained we felt when we witnessed the amount of self in the love they possessed and conveyed."
— 2025
"かみさま。Give us the strength to stay with those emotions a little bit longer—just a little longer."
— 2025
"Will we have the courage to tell them the truth, when it is going to hurt?"
— 2025
"Our desires, they make us cruel the same as they make us kind."
— 2025
"What is true pureness, if not something only the purest can see and feel?"
— 2025
"How often we feel guilty for the pain we feel."
— 2025
"We find a significantly purer degree of love in those who erased their entire existence to survive the weight of life than in those who remain unchanged."
— 2025
"Is it blindness, fairness, fortune, or is it the only fitting punishment when one erode one’s morals trying to leave a mark on a world that forces its most genuine souls to give up their life—a world where a true mark can no longer leave a trace, infatuated by the perpetual, machinery-like instincts of survival."