Sometimes, I feel that I love someone deeply, someone I don’t know and haven’t met. As if the heart can take a life of its own, answering to the beats and calls of another’s heart without my conscious awareness. But I feel this love echoing in the recesses of my soul — my raison d’être. As though this organ of mine has a will of its own, and has loved this person over and over again, for repeated lifetimes. As if it can sleep soundly at night knowing that it loves and is loved, and that one day it will reunite with its beloved. If and when our paths cross, I hope that I’ll see light in their eyes. Then I’ll smile and say, “There you are, I’ve been waiting for you.”

**

“If one of Murakami’s male protagonists adopted form, it would be him,” I thought as I studied his grace of movement. He exudes an air of mystery. Perhaps a solitary figure of quiet intellect — a romantic, even. But alas, enveloped with a little sadness. And the arch of his back — as if he carried on his heroic shoulders years of repressed dreams, hopes, emotions. I find myself longing to embrace this mysterious arch and to rest my cheeks there. And how he smiles when he’s deeply immersed in his activities — a smile that parallels a child’s innocence of spirit. Here’s an individual who seems to possess, at once, a heaviness and a lightness of heart. I feel my soul being penetrated when he looks my way. I see that his eyes smile. Sharp, piercing eyes. Yet tender and loving. I know those eyes. They feel like home.

**

These are long, solitary nights. I am with and without a home. Home was Franz Schubert’s Serenade and gazing at the stars. Here, and only here, am I infinite. Such sweet taste, like fine nectar; and ever so sweet if one has tasted the bitterness of inhabiting a cage, wings clipped.