Inside

I had been thinking about earthquakes all day.

Not that a day goes by without thinking about them, mind you. Not a day goes by that I don't feel my body shake, even though the ground stands still.

But lately they had seemed to have disappeared. And perhaps, because in my mind, we were due to have one any time soon, I was lead to think of them all day.

Earlier today, as I mindlessly browsed Facebook for hours while waiting for packages to arrive, a friend of mine mentioned a National Geographic documentary about the March 11th quake, and how she couldn't watch more than seven minutes of it. So I looked it up myself. I only got through five.

I don't know why I looked it up. Maybe curiosity. Maybe a sort of deranged nostalgia. I couldn't remember the feeling of an earthquake. Everything just felt so distant. So far. But as I watched what seemed like hours of footage squeezed into the several hundred seconds of video I actually watched, I felt entirely tense. I had goosebumps. I had tears in my eyes. And I couldn't look away.

I could have probably watched the whole thing. But I saw the state I was already in, and figured that mentally, emotionally, and probably physically as well, I probably shouldn't put myself through this right now. Not now.

The day passed by, and I kept thinking of everything. Of how life has changed. How I have changed since March. And how incomprehensible all this is to those who weren't here.

In my mind, this is the most significant uchi/soto relationship.

Tonight, as I sat in my nearly pitch-black room, the light bulb to my only lamp dead and currently un-changeable, the ground began to shake again. After weeks of calm, the chaos returned.

This is what separates us.