Цитаты из книги ヘヴン [Heaven]

“Maybe we are weak, in a way. But that’s not a bad thing. If we’re weak, our weakness has real meaning. We may be weak, but we get it. We know what’s important, and we know what’s wrong. That’s just not true for anyone else in class. They pretend they don’t know what’s going on. They act nice to the ones who step all over us just to stay on their good side, and to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to them. They act like their hands are clean, but they aren’t. They don’t get it, not at all. They’re no different from the ones who hurt us. The only ones who aren’t involved with them are you and me.

What is dying anyway? I let this impossible question fill the darkness of my bedroom. I thought about how somebody was always dying somewhere, at any given moment. This isn’t a fable or a joke or an abstract idea. People are always dying. It’s a perfect truth. No matter how we live our lives, we all die sooner or later. In which case, living is really just waiting to die. And if that’s true, why bother living at all? Why was I even alive? I made myself crazy, tossing and turning, hyperventilating. Then it hit me: dying is just like sleeping. You only know you’re sleeping when you wake up the next day, but if morning never comes, you sleep forever. That must be what death is like. When someone dies, they don’t even know they’re dead. Because they never see it happen, nobody ever really dies. This hit me like a sucker punch. At first, my desire to die was a desire to disappear. I wanted to erase myself and feel real peace. But if dying doesn’t actually involve a moment where you die, could I really disappear? Wouldn’t death basically mean wandering around forever, in something like a dream? It made me wonder: who could tell the difference between living in this world and living in a dream?

One day, there was a story about a bullied middle-schooler who had killed himself. A single spotlight fell onto a sheet of paper, and a solemn voice read an excerpt from his diary that sounded like a suicide note. When the voice-over was finished, the principal of his middle school and other concerned parties expressed their crippling guilt and bowed toward the camera, which cut to interviews with fellow students, their faces blurred. His family and his teachers and his classmates all claimed not to have noticed anything was wrong. What had they done to him—what made him do it? According to the program, they stole his things and shook him down for money, but the worst part was how violently they beat him. If I turned off the TV, the news would go away, but life as I knew it wouldn’t change. There was no way for me to make my life go away. My thoughts made me want to scream at the top of my lungs, but I managed to bottle up the feeling and forced myself to acknowledge that I didn’t have it half as bad as the kid who killed himself. But that made me feel worse than ever. What could be more callous than using a suicide to make yourself feel better? Pretending to feel better wasn’t going to solve anything. Not if I was just pretending