Three Days of Happiness

“What’s a set distance?”
“It’s not particularly exact, but I would say roughly a hundred
meters.”
That’s something I wish she’d have said to start with. “I’ll be
careful,” I told her.
A sequence of smaller sounds echoed in the sky. The display
seemed to be entering its climax.
I realized things had quieted down next door. Maybe they’d gone to
see these fireworks too.
Then finally, Miyagi began to talk. About everything that could have
happened.
“Now then, about your lost thirty years... First of all, your life at
college ends in a blink,” Miyagi said. “You merely pay bills, read
books, listen to music, and sleep - often. It gradually becomes
impossible to distinguish one hollow day from another. Once that
happens, the time flies by. You graduate college having learned
nothing in particular, and ironically, you come to feel scorn for the
time when you were brimming with hope.
“You know you should have accepted the reality back then - but
unable to let go of the feeling that you were special, believing that
this wasn’t where you belonged, you could never get accustomed
to it. You travel back and forth between home and work every day
with vacant eyes, working your body into dust, and with no time to
think, you come to enjoy drinking the days away. Your conviction
that you will someday be famous vanishes, and you become
someone quite estranged from your childhood fantasies.”
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