NARRATIVE
NARRATIVE: THE WORD COFFEE
Another landscape.
Times, encounters, and words that should not have existed.
For a very long time, I wandered in a space covered in gray, where all colors had been lost. Countless fragments were scattered there, most of them broken. My breathing became shallow, and even my senses were fading. To escape the indescribable suffering, I spent a long time repeatedly thinking only of disappearing.
The illness would not allow me to exist.
The gray space was turning into deep darkness.
Standing on a fragile, crumbling boundary, just as I was about to gaze into the abyss, I saw a faint hint of color among the scattered fragments. I felt I needed to gather them before everything was enveloped in darkness.
After a very long time, so long that my memory became vague, I continued to collect these colored fragments. Then, I suddenly noticed that the gray space, which had been turning into darkness, had transformed into a colorful landscape.
These colors were fragments of words and memories, overlooked and almost forgotten deep within my heart.
When I touched them, I realized that everything that had happened until then was connected. I felt the inevitability of this "flow."
Among the fragments scattered in the gray space, there was a fragment containing a vivid amber color and words.
Decades ago, before I got lost in that gray space, on a chilly autumn evening, I had a special experience. It was an encounter, etched deep in my heart, with a transparent, vivid amber-colored drink that was entirely different from the coffee I had known since childhood.
If not for that event, which instantly changed my perception of coffee—something I had casually treated as just a hobby—and became the catalyst for entering its profound world, that amber fragment would not have existed in the gray space, and I would not be here today as a purveyor of coffee.
A small catalyst is etched deep in memory, and at some point, it becomes the key to a new world. One such catalyst was that single cup of coffee I encountered on that chilly autumn evening.
Even the smallest events unconsciously chain together, influencing each other, eventually becoming their own colors and landscapes.
Even if I were to be swallowed by the gray space again, I would no longer be lost. For the colored fragments, and the many words they contain, truly exist there.
I hope that by continuing to weave these feelings in various forms, sometimes even transcending words, I can become a "small catalyst" for someone else.
So that words, and their breath, are never lost.