Status Updates From Kakigori Summer

There’s no ending to a story, just like there isn’t any beginning. There’s only where you choose to start telling it, and where you decide to stop. The thing that goes on, and on, and on, is life, in all its grimness and sorrow, and pockets of beauty and love so spectacular they’re almost too bright to see.

It is not acceptable to look at someone else’s life and think, please god don’t let me end up like that, especially if you don’t even have an alternative suggestion.

It feels like I’ve been sitting in the dark by myself for a long time, me and the monsters in my head, but now somebody’s opened the door a crack. I don’t want to go too near, in case it closes again, but I can hear sounds on the other side, and imagine what it would feel like to step through it.

I suddenly remember that there’ll always be coffee, that whatever happens, somewhere in the world people will be waking up to that hopeful smell, and another day. That seems like a kind of magic.

You can have everything the way you want it, by yourself.

There’s no exact translation for ‘cosy’ in Japanese, like there isn’t for ‘yorimichi’ in English, a word that gets translated as ‘detour’ but suggests the places you go when you don’t want to go home and you’re wandering to find an excuse to stay out, or ‘waku waku’, ostensibly the onomatopoeic sound of your heartbeat, but adding this excitement and uncertainty and wide-eyed coyness that doesn’t really come across wh