I'm not myself any more. It's hard to put it into words, but I guess it's as if I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling. Can you understand what I'm getting at?

My eyes tell me I'm the same old me, but something's different from usual. Not that I can clearly recall what "usual" was. Ever since I stepped off the plane I can't shake this very real, deconstructive illusion. Illusion? I guess that's the word...

Sumire from Haruki Murakami's "Sputnik Sweetheart" is dear to my heart as a disoriented, lovely weirdo, providing a glimpse into a complex psyche structured in an interesting way; her disconnection from the real world and lack of care for any of it, choosing to cast deep, wide focus on other things like introspection and literature; judging everything using her unique, psychedelic amalgamation of knowledge, and so experiencing quite unique planes of feelings and situations; eventually changing, and being confused, listless, vulnerable, and then leaping forward and up, breaking out of the environment that has been crafted for her up to that point. Since the descriptions of her inner workings are so tender, careful, reading was a bit like walking through a temple.

I think most people live in a fiction. I'm no exception. Think of it in terms of a car's transmission. It's like a transmission that stands between you and the harsh realities of life. You take the raw power from outside and use gears to adjust it so everything's all nicely in sync. That's how you keep your fragile body intact. Does this make any sense?

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness? Without any fuss, then, I gave up worrying about the difference between knowing and not knowing. That became my point of departure. A terrible place to start, perhaps — but people need a makeshift springboard, right? All of which goes to explain how I started seeing dualisms such as theme and style, object and subject, cause and effect, the joints of my hand and the rest of me, not as black-and-white pairs, but as indistinguishable one from the other. Everything had spilled on the kitchen floor — the salt, pepper, flour, starch. Ali mixed into one fine blob.

Sometimes I feel so lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you're used to has been ripped away. Like there's no more gravity, and I'm left to drift in outer space. With no idea where I'm headed.