Hanami

Mar. 29, 2021

Hanami

Last night, I spent the evening with my Italian friend, drinking under the Sakura blossoms and doing ‘hanami’. After a while he told me that he had also invited his now ex-girlfriend. They broke up just a few weeks ago, but, given the circumstances, they still live under the same roof. Despite the break-up, they still seem to hang around together pretty well.

After drinking, I missed my last train as always and I had to stay at their place. On the way there, we rode the bikes together, and they were on the same bike. Seeing the way the two were riding through the night, one would not have guessed that they were only a ‘once-was’ couple. Their behaviour signalled such complicity, such tenderness that I could not refrain from taking a picture of them, even though I was also moving.

He has decided to leave Japan and return to Italy in June. Their time together is expiring. I felt like I was taking a picture of the past. Like archeologists, when they discover an important artifact in an unfortunate position (like that cemetery in Florence) and knowing that they will not be able to preserve their finding, they take as many pictures as they can, in the desperate attempt to save their discovery from the oblivion of the underground. In the same way, my picture of them was a monument to the past, to something that was once sacred and that, like everything else, had just been torn apart by the world, swelled by the waves of life.

When we arrived at their place, they set a futon up for me, and we went to sleep. Because the bedroom was not so large, they were forced to sleep together (which, my friend told me, they had stopped doing since the break-up). Their house was, in a way, a representation of their last-stage relationship. Destroyed by time, every room had been left in a state of chaos and neglect. The dirt on the ground, on the furniture, on everything, wasn’t a sign of uncleanness, but rather of the final surrender of the two to the realization that, inevitably, all things in this world must fall apart. I wondered how it must feel for them to be together in the same bed again. If they were secretly glad that I was there that night, giving them a last chance to be close to each other, before splitting up for the rest of their time.

The next day, I leave early to go to work. They are still sleeping, peacefully next to each other, I don’t wake them up. On the way to the subway station, a mom and her daughter run after a trash truck who didn’t pick up their bags. The sky is clear, of a pale blue light.