If you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.

What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realized I'd never really tasted to things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been. What life would I have? I would be like the dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.

My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.

Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.