A Diary Without Dates

By Nakamura Chio


I, no sense of being alive, live next door to death.

My neck was so feeble, it toppled when anyone touched it.
I felt I had turned to stone.

Every day my anxiety grew deeper, until it enveloped me so thickly that I could see nothing.
Alone in an illimitable desert I wept hopelessly, as if in a nightmare in dawn where the open mouth blue sky wept with me.


The trees wept, a bird's body, a horses bleached bones, all spellbound.
Immoble, we watched with bated breath the figure if death.

The world was unbearably still.
I sat side by side with death, held immobile in reality, only hoping I would not fall.