I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch the episode where Hayley dies. It will make me cry again, and crying hurts.

Don’t want to go into specifics, but I have things in common with all three. I’m also very different from all three, because I doubt I'll ever be as brave or as kind as any of them. Was talking to a friend about how much I wish I could emulate them; she said that wanting to be like them is the first step. I think that was very wise of her to say.

Never want to watch or read about characters who are too much like me. Need to relate at arm’s length. These three have just the right balance of distance and relatability for me. There were moments in all their lives that felt very close to things I’ve experienced, but never so close that it felt like seeing my reflection in a mirror. Just close enough.

“You are the best people on this whole mad, flipping, stupid planet.” — Becky

Do people think it’s silly, the way I have to keep my things near me? The way I have to carry my things around? The way I get worried if I don’t know where my things are? Do they laugh at me?

Some people don’t have any things.

My things have a life of their own.

Kind of imagery you’d find in horror stories like The Ring or Videodrome, but used so gently here.

Sounds so simple. Like it was waiting to be played.

Where are you being held in real life? In your room or someone else’s? Imagine a girl you don’t know passing from screen to room. Imagine you’re the girl.

Listening to this song, I picture myself becoming real. I stop being 2D. Best of all, I get to picture myself being held in someone’s arms. I get to imagine two gentle, warm arms wrapping softly around me, holding me safe.

And then, when the music swells at the very end, it feels like I’m shrinking. Not held in someone’s arms anymore. Now I’m held in one of their palms. Tiny and safe.

She’s been taken away by people. They allow her to watch TV and listen to music, but they’ve still drugged her, and won’t let her go. She knows something bad is about to happen, but she can’t make sense of her thoughts.

Try listening to this track without context. Pretend the other songs aren’t there. Put it outside. You find a cassette, discarded on the ground. You take it home, press play. This girl’s voice is the only thing on it. Blank except for this.

Sometimes interstitials are more interesting than the full story. They end before they begin.

Pushing Ahead of the Dame describes this segue as “voyeuristic” and even “exploitative and cruel.” It’s true. Don’t know how to feel about Grace’s horrid cassette, but it fascinates me more than any of the surrounding songs.

Nothing is smooth in the place where I live. Everything is kept rough and bumpy. I have no idea why, but the most of the others here seem to like it that way. They want it to stay ugly. They want the ground to stay uneven and the sounds to stay noise. I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.

I wish every step I made could flow smoothly to the next. I wish every sound I heard could flow smoothly in one ear and out the other. I wish my eyes could flow over every sentence without getting caught and torn on a snagged word. I wish my skin had no rough, raw areas, so clothes could flow over it without any discomfort. I wish my thoughts would flow smoothly, and not curdle.

I try so hard to move the way other people do. To follow the right movements, to do the right things at the right times. Never works. Get it all wrong. Something always upsets the flow.

Keep getting stuck, because I’m walking on flypaper. Keep tripping up. Too many folds in the carpet. All my bad thoughts keep me from flowing. Keep me from gliding smoothly. Keep me from feeling soft. All my bad thoughts keep me as rough and raw as those ugly areas of my skin.

Where is it going? Did it follow the signs? Or did something else point it in another direction? Doesn’t matter anyway. Everything ends up in the same place, even with different directions. Everything ends up going in the same direction, even if it’s going to a different place.

Needs directions or it can’t go anywhere.

Nothing you could do.

So now what?

Take a step to the side. Maybe. You could do that. Fold things differently. Who knows? But you’ll still be in the same maze. You’ll still have to pass new points. Maybe you could stop instead of just passing. Stop for a moment. Just to rest.

Well, that’s it. You have to stop now. Get off here. Stay away and don’t come back.

Those fairies don’t look real at all; even in photos, they look flat. But fairies aren’t real anyway. And, if you were someone who really wanted to believe, you’d assume that fairies wouldn’t look real. Not by human standards. Maybe that’s just how something from another world would appear on camera. Maybe cameras can’t capture their image properly.

I don’t believe in fairies. Not as an adult. But I used to, as a kid. I think I knew deep down that they weren’t real, but I wanted them to exist so bad that I came up with all sorts of explanations.

Strange contrast between the girls and their cut-outs. The way they play pretend, posing with those fake fairies, give all the photos a kind of glow. They look so ordinary and so unusual st the same time. The fairies are so fanciful that the girls seem like the otherworldly ones, 3D people inside a 2D world.

They’re so calm. That makes sense when you know it’s a hoax. But imagine how eerie their calmness would seem if you didn’t know.

I’d never be able to put those kinds of daydreams in any poem or story, though. Even admitting them here makes me feel silly and vulnerable. I avoid putting any kind of romance in my own work. Not because I don’t want to, but because I wouldn’t know how. Anyone reading it would know it isn’t real. Someone as talented as Tawara can make those kinds of daydreams feel real, but not me. I’d just expose my naivety and lack of imagination. I can only conceive of very simple things when it comes to this. Faint strokes of ink, like being held or kissed. How do people become couples? How can people know that another person likes them? How do relationships bud and blossom. No idea.

Still going to daydream. Still going to picture myself and all my bridesmaids in matching white dresses.

This is your secret room. It’s a special place, somewhere you come to feel secure, somewhere to store all your intimate things. But that doesn’t stop you from bringing all your bad thoughts and insecurities inside.

You used to have a pet bunny, back when you were a kid. Other kids made fun of you for it, but you still loved that rabbit. Then something happened. You still love rabbits, but you don’t have a pet bunny anymore.

There’s something so plaintive about this album. A need to be understood and listened to. It reminds me so much of Irisu Syndrome, another story about a lonely kid and a dead rabbit. In both The Bunny Boy and Irisu Syndrome, comfort and trauma are tangled up. Something bad happened in the past. Something soft and safe turned into something confusing and upsetting. A lonely, naive child to grew up to be a lonely, childlike adult who struggles with reality.

The Bunny Boy’s voice sounds covered with aluminium foil. He’s desperate to figure things out, and to find his brother. He gets obsessive, then deflated. The Bunny Boy wants to be listened to. He wants to be believed. But he’s not always sure if he believes himself. So many things seem connected. So many things seem disconnected. So many things seem to be about to happen. So many things never happen. He’s alone in his secret room, stuck with all his memories, fantasies, and broken things.

From what I’ve read, nobody knows if Lao Tzu was a real person. This book could be an amalgam of different people’s thoughts and ideas, put together under one name. It feels like it came from one person, though. A person with flaws like anyone else. There’s no such thing as perfect writing. As elegant and simple as the Tao Te Ching is, all its sentences are still human.

Lao Tzu isn’t just saying things; Lao Tzu is trying to say things, like everyone else. Every translator, from Arthur Waley to Ursula K. Le Guin, phrases his words in different ways, because there’s no perfect way to express this book’s images and feelings.

So many dense academic text books over-explain life’s contradictions in rough, granular detail, while the Tao Te Ching expresses them smoothly. But its words are never too smooth. Reading it, you get the feeling that all these thoughts could be expressed even simpler. Does everything have to be perfectly simple and smooth? No, because that’s impossible. But I appreciate the effort taken to be simple and smooth. Way more considerate than a book filled with roundabout sentences, tripping over itself to say everything.

I’m not looking for some perfect book of wisdom that tells me everything. I’m not looking for something that will make me feel smart. I’m just looking for something that resonates. And when I read what the Tao Te Ching has to say about darkness, light, closeness, distance, etc., I feel a resonance.

Not just resonance. Also warmth. It’s deep and shallow.

Another fun fact: Elle, the new Legally Blonde TV series, is set in the past, and was also made in the past. Everything was made in the past. However, some things were made deeper in the past. The Legally Blonde films were made before the show. Elle was made closer to the present, even though Elle Woods is younger in the show than she was in the films. Elle takes place before Legally Blonde. Eventually, Elle will recede further into the past, but it will always have been made after Legally Blonde, despite taking place before it. This has never happened before.

A third fun fact: in episode one of her new show, Elle adds pink hearts to her band t-shirt. She is shunned for this in the nineties, but today the world understands that every band t-shirt should include pink hearts.

Maybe that’s what the Toy Story series is all about. Toy Story 5, the latest in the franchise, tones it down, but the neediness never disappears. When Jessie the Cowgirl remembers being forgotten and then sold by her original owner in Toy Story 2, with golden sunlight flashing through the leaves above, it is so plaintive that I ache.

Ryo Hanmura’s Cardboard Box (trans. David Lewis) is a short story that shares some things in common with the Toy Story films. Like Pixar’s toys, the cardboard boxes know what they were made for. They also want what they were made for. They want to be filled. No time is wasted explaining how or why these objects can think or feel, because that’s not important. They just can and do. And eventually, in an unexpected way, their needs are met.

One of my favourite scenes in the series is from Toy Story 4, where Woody is played with for the first time in years by a new kid named Bonnie. When she hugs him tight, he smiles, and you can feel the warmth spread through him. Just like Hanmura’s boxes, he is filled with something he was made for, and something he needs. It goes beyond anything functional. A toy’s needs, like a box’s, are deep and emotional. But are they the same as a human’s needs?

One thing I love about the Toy Story series is that the toys are not a direct metaphor for any specific human thing. They are comparable and applicable to humans and their experiences, but these films are still about the toys as toys. This makes their neediness so much more specific, and because of that, more effective. The unreality of the toys makes them all the more real.

The toys are alive, but not like humans are alive. It fits with the animators’ attempts to give a sense of life to computer animation. From what I understand, actual humans were still difficult and expensive to animate back then, so Pixar worked with their limitations and made movies about toys and bugs. (As someone with her own limitations, stuff like this inspires me.) Sid’s drab house, with its ugly green walls, is the perfect place for Buzz to finally understand that he is just a toy. A house in the Toy Story world is completely inanimate. It has no life at all, and Sid’s house is especially lifeless. Thanks to the early CGI animation, everything in the first film looks a little lifeless, and this suits the sad scenes so well.

Kids bring toys to life through play. Animators bring inanimate objects to life in similar ways. Isn’t so much of fiction about playing with dolls?

Boa - For Jasmine

Otto Tameila - Sunflower

Cuushe - Summer Night Sketch

Lalleshwari - Darkangel

FKA Twigs - Touch a Girl

Pinkpantheress - Intermission

Oklou - Forces

Janet Jackson - Empty

Tricky - Taxi

Opus III - Fine Day

Frou Frou - Pyschobabble

Olivia Rodrigo - Brutal

The Boom - Yes Mom

Bananarama - Cruel Summer

Fiona Apple - Slow Like Honey

Kilo Kish - Humans + Ants in Proportion

You’ll Never Get to Heaven - Setting Sun

The Cure - Disintegration

Squarepusher - Goodnight Jade

SZA - Normal Girl

Living Legends - Never Falling Down

Queen Adreena - Madraykin

Boards of Canada - Dandelion

Aphex Twin - Lichen

Coaltar of the Deepers - Dear Future

Janet Jackson - Velvet Rope

Bahamadia - Spontaneity

Bjork - Play Dead

ARB - Grey Wednesday

Groove Armada - My Friend

X Japan - Forever Love

Saint Etienne - Side Streets

Unkle - Unreal

Steve Roach - Quiet Friend

Morcheeba - Fear and Love

MGMT - Kids

Nine Inch Nails - The Frail

Depeche Mode - Precious

Tujiko Noriko - Endless End

Rebecca - Moon

The Scary Jokes - Is That Me??

MIA - Caps Lock

Kidkanevil - All is Lost

Massive Attack - Everywhen

Nia Archives - Gud Gudbyez

Boards of Canada - You Retreat in Time and Space

The Holydrug Couple - Dreamy

Boa - Twilight

Honda’s search gets more hopeless as he ages. More hopeless, more pathetic, more uncertain. It’s likely those two boys and that one girl just had something in common with Kiyoaki. And maybe Kiyoaki was less like Honda remembers. Reincarnation only exists in fiction. And even in fiction, it isn’t always certain.

Funny that Honda, someone so practical and by the book, lets himself hope for reincarnation. He never says it directly, but I think it’s his way of expressing how much he loved his friend.

In Deep River by Shusaku Endo (trans. Van C. Gessel), an office worker visits India after the death of his wife. She told him she would be reborn. Her death makes him sad and lonely in ways he never anticipated. He never knew how much he needed her. So, like Honda, despite not being the type to believe in this kind of thing, he goes to find her.

There’s an episode of Revolutionary Girl Utena where Anthy asks Utena if she believes in reincarnation. It’s unclear why she asks this, but her tone implies it’s more than empty bedtime conversation. Maybe Anthy asks because she’s starting to fall in love with Utena, but doesn’t believe it’s possible for them to be together in this life. Maybe that hopeless feeling makes something like reincarnation seem possible.

Imagine how it feels when someone is gone forever, but you’re still waiting. That’s what happens in the CLAMP manga series xxxHolic. Watanuki’s close friend Yuuko is gone, and was always gone, but he stays at her old home, hoping she’ll come back.

xxxHolic draws from the first dream in Natsume Soseki’s Ten Nights of Dreams (trans. Lovetta R. Lorenz and Takumi Kashima), where a man sits and waits for a dead woman to return, just like she asked him. He waits a long time, and she returns. It’s not in the way he expects, but she returns.

I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I understand why someone would hope for it.

Funny how so many stories and myths depict the first stage of the afterlife as some kind of waiting room. In purgatory, you have to stand in line, take a ticket, fill out paperwork, etc. Details of your life are checked and double-checked. Sometimes details of your life don’t match up with details of your death. It’s frustrating and you just want to go home. Maybe, like in Horse Legs, you’ll end up alive again, but with the awful knowledge that someday you’ll have to go through all this again.

This part of the afterlife is just limbo. You’re supposed to pass through and reach somewhere else. But passing through could take a long time, and there’s also the worry that your final stop is worse. And what if there is no guarantee of leaving limbo? Maybe you’re stuck in a waiting room, with an aching back and people you don’t know.

At least in Horse Legs the process is quick. Other stories, such as Shehan Karunatilaka’s novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, or the 1988 film Beetlejuice, give us dead characters who spend a lot longer in otherworldly waiting rooms. These limbos resemble places they’ve waited in while living.

In Beetlejuice, recently deceased couple Barbara and Adam discover a waiting room limbo that is even more poorly managed. The staff they encounter are also dead people, not angels. It’s bad enough having to wait in purgatory, but working while you wait, sorting through other people’s paperwork, sounds worse. Everything and everyone in the afterlife is just a mangled, broken down, used up version of the living world. The only promise of something transcendent lies way off in the distance.

At least Barbara and Adam aren’t completely stuck; they can haunt their old house, and act as parents to Lydia, the new girl living there. They form something sweet in a bleak situation.