This World Is Impermanent

On my commute route there’s a liquor shop standing alone in a residential area.

Beside its storefront is a cherry tree that juts out grandly over the road, serving nicely as a sunshade, and beneath it the elderly shopkeeper would, without fail, morning and evening, sit in a half-broken chair, cigarette in hand, and see the passersby off with a smile.

How many times was I healed by that somehow Asian, comforting scene and kindness.

That old man passed away a few days ago, and the half-broken chair left behind and the cherry tree stand there forlornly.

One morning, going along that road, the jutting cherry branches had been cut down, the half-broken chair was nowhere to be seen, and at the sorrow of the former mood and its traces being erased, I felt a shock as though an era had ended.

“To change is progress,” people often say… but no—this place, I wish, could have been one where “to stay unchanged is progress too.”