Coffee Spoons

Where do I even start with this entry? I’ve been meaning to write about “5 cm Per Second” for the longest time, but I kept putting it off because just the task of it was so daunting. For me, watching 5 cm is such a personal experience that I can’t write about it without empathizing to the point of being vulnerable. I’ve always had the issue of being too emotional in my writing, whether it’s for academic essays or anime blogging. People see the act of showing emotions as a vulnerability and they reprimand me for being so stupidly open with myself. On certain days, I agree with them. But when it comes down to it, I can’t write in any other way because my emotions are what move me to write and put these words down onto the screen; otherwise I wouldn’t have started blogging at all if I couldn’t write about the things that have touched me in some way, left their impressions on me, made me laugh or cry or think really hard until my head hurt.

[Warning: Spoilers, Sap, and Suck ahead. SRSLY.]

This is the wiki summary of 5 cm Per Second: “a chain of short stories about their distance”

Upon graduating from elementary school, Takaki Tōno and his close friend Akari Shinohara drifted apart. Akari moved to Tochigi Prefecture due to her parents’ jobs, while Takaki attended a junior high in Tokyo. The two kept in contact by writing letters, but despite the special feelings that existed between them, the only thing that persisted was time.

5 cm per second made me cry so hard that I could barely catch my breath. And then afterwards, I ached for days every time I closed my eyes and recalled the aesthetics of it. Makoto Shinkai has been criticized for reusing the same fundamental plot [distance = QQ] in all of his works. While I do agree that he needs to experiment with new storylines for future productions, I think he rightly played to all of his strengths in 5 cm. I’m mesmerized and seduced by the concept of distance in 5 cm and how you can go so far but still not move at all from the point where life let you down and broke your heart. Shinkai is a prodigy of aesthetic grief. Everything, everything from the breathlessly beautiful settings, to the attention to tiny details that instilled nostalgia into the mundane, to the bare-bones dialogues delivered in all of their quiet wonder… all of these things consumed me whole, pulled me into Shinkai’s world of inevitability, made me hold my breath, sucking in as much air as I could contain and holding it all inside, feeling so full and empty all at once.

Kanae Sumita, in Cosmonaut [part II], said, “It must be so lonely, being in the dark, never knowing if you’ll ever bump into anything or find anyone. It’s too lonely like that, lifting your hands so earnestly towards the vast night sky.” In between the moments when I’ve fucked up and before I can pick myself back up, I wondered if life will always be like that, the endless search in the pitch blackness and the disappointments at every turn. Things don’t work out between Kanae and Takaki because he can’t see anything for himself beyond Akari. So then, what happens to those feelings that Kanae can’t convey? What becomes of them and where will they go now that it’s impossible to make them known to the person who matters most?

Melodrama theory would suggest that they go into the artwork itself. One such theory is that melodrama is an art medium that strives to express the inexpressible. The boundless regrets, the private suffering, the dreams that can’t be realized, all of these things that cannot be voiced appear within the anime in nonverbal, stylistic features that speak for the characters when they themselves cannot. When there is silence in the face of great suffering, there will be emotional excess. These excesses then get translated into the scenery, into the techni-colored skies, the vivid hues of sunlight reflecting off of chrome surfaces, and all the meticulous details that the artist painstakingly took the time to include in every frame. This is why just perceiving Shinkai’s artwork is emotionally taxing in and of itself, because it serves to be the interpreter of all the things that are too shameful or embarrassing or too heavy to be said out loud.

The sky caps from Cosmonaut are visual orgasms for my eyes. These skies with so many stars and crowded galaxies and the purple and blue astral gases, they stretch out into the darkness, wide-open spaces full of hollow minutes and empty years. For the characters, being under them, always gazing up at them, always wondering, feeling so small and strange, I can imagine their painful anxiety when they think about the future. And in the next part, it creeps up on them so suddenly that the momentum, the unwanted realization and unwilling acceptance of it, breaks them.

In the last part of 5 cm, Takaki has grown into a man, working and living on his own. He throws himself into his job and comes home to an empty apartment, floor littered with empty beer cans. His days are all the same. He lives like he’s not really living, always staring off into the distance, always looking jilted and so, so tired.

“Just by living one’s life, sadness accumulates here and there, be it in the sheets hung out in the sun to dry, the toothbrushes in the bathroom, and the history logs of mobile phones.”

The image of him sitting in his dark room, the soft glow of the TV, the rumpled bed sheets, all of that stayed with me long after I finished the movie. When I look to the future I can see those things for myself. And I felt devastated and relieved, all at once.

At the end of 5 cm per second, Takaki and Akari walk past each other and just as he was about to turn and look at her, a speeding train blocks his view, and he loses out again. So he stands and stares with all of his regrets and sorrows and resentments. He knows that it is her [how could he not] and he probably knows too that she has moved on and is now living a life that he is not [cannot be] apart of. And yet he’s still able to walk away from that scene with the softest smile on his face. Somehow, I think he must be so relieved. It’s like encountering a ghost and finding out that that girl from your memory isn’t the same anymore. She’s no longer a static figure. She’s grown and changed and fallen in love with someone else who isn’t you. And devastation and relief mixes together inside of you, propelling you forward, so that you can take it step and step and someday when you look back [it'll still hurt, it'll never stop hurting] you can see how far you’ve come and all the distance that you’ve put between then and now and how that has changed you.

And now I spill my soul: Don’t bother reading on if you don’t care for EMO [i.e. Don't complain to me about my emo shit. Just don't read it if you don't like it.]

~ * ~

Rereading what I have written, I realize that my editorial on 5 cm may seem overly dramatic and ridiculous to some of my readers because of my excessive empathizing [read: spreading my petty emo shit all over the internet] with the plight of the characters.

As Sat has talked about at length in this post, perhaps 5 cm affects each person differently depending on the real life experiences that they have had and how they can find parallels to those experiences within the film.

going up in smokes

For me, 5 cm is an arrow that points back and back to a boy. This boy was the one who introduced me to anime and gave me 5 cm to watch. And the story is as cliché as they come: Girl meets boy. They bicker and flirt and get close and become BFFs because they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and compensated for each other’s shortcomings. Boy chases girl. Girl slows down and lets the boy catch her. Girl moves away to another city and breaks off the relationship because she wanted to save herself from the pain. And things were just peachy at first because I got so busy with my shiny, new life and my shiny, new friends and all of the shiny, new extracurriculars that I picked up to fill in the empty spaces created by the transition. In between cramming for my AP classes and juggling my responsibilities as news editor of the school’s paper, I didn’t had time for “what if’s”, “if only’s”, or “maybe’s”. And for some reason, I thought that I had cheated the system, that I had bypassed the pain and emotional consequences all together. I thought I was a fucking genius for being so productive about my angst.

It was so strange then, when I found his sweater in my closet during a random cleaning spree. It was ratty and musty and so fucking ugly that I had originally asked him give it to me just so he wouldn’t wear it anymore. And when the tears soaked through it, I remember thinking something crazy like, “God, I really should have washed this piece of shit before using it as a tissue.”

So the pain came anyway and the girl has all the regrets in the world. And then the girl comes to realize how stupid she is. Because she knows that the guy is far from perfect, that he’s no Romeo, that he can be a major asshole when it comes down to it. He’s insensitive and petty, sucks at communication, and is incredibly immature about a lot of things that matter. So basically, he’s human and flawed and I used his shortcomings as excuses to run away from my own feelings. But the reality is that all of the good things about him that I took for granted before still make him one of the best guys that I know. And he deserves all of the best things in life. So the girl felt BAD for being so fucking selfish and cowardly, for hurting him by running away.

Back then we were only an hour away from each other. Really, either of us could’ve taken a bus to go see the other [and gotten caught in a snowstorm and QQ as the scenery inched past outside the window]. There was even a E!HollywoodTrueStory Love Hina promise that we would try to get into the same college [you never know, it could really happen, wouldn’t it be kool 2 go 2 skool 2gether4eva? promise me, promise me that your heart will go on~]. Yeah… it didn’t work out that way. We did end up getting accepted into the same colleges, but we both independently decided that we wanted to take responsibility for our own separate futures because we didn’t want to keep adding to these regrets between us. That and I would’ve killed myself for going to college for a guy.

So I am where I am today and while I do have my regrets [that I do] I wouldn’t change any of the things that have happened in the past because they all led me here, to the person that I am. The distance between us has grown from an hour to several hundred miles and boundless gaps of time in which we both became different people from who we were before. He and I still talk, still remain good friends, still fight over shit that neither of us can undo or change, still have the same regrets.

Thinking back on it, on the time that we’ve spent together, it’s always the time apart that stands out to me. It never even occurred to me until recently, but after I moved away and there was that long gap where he and I lost touch and didn’t talk at all… those must have been pretty hard times for him. I didn’t think to consider his feelings. I was too fixated on my own hurt. I didn’t think that he might be lonely too, being left behind in Smallville while his girlfriend/best friend went off to yonder. I’ve always thought that I was the one being abandoned because I had to move away from everything familiar to me. If anything, he has shown me just how self-involved I can be and since then I’ve been more conscious about that aspect of myself. Rife ressions FTW!

I want to be able to get to a certain point someday where all of this won’t be so pressing or hard on either of us. Not as strangers passing each other on the streets; but to somewhere comfortable enough where I can have a conversation with him without thinking about how it used to be or how it could have been, and ask about his happiness without any lingering resentment. I want it to be so that neither of us would have to feel bad for how things fell apart because by then we would have already filled in all of the gaping holes with our own achievements and lived experiences.

But that day seems so far off that I probably won’t even be able to make it out in the distant horizon even if I squinted. So until then, I will keep blogging about something that most people brush off as a hobby or pastime, keep tucking my pain into these words, keep hiding my disappointment in between these lines, and he will be kind and it will be fine.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 3:26 am and is filed under anime, movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.