If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

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.

A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.

We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.

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.