5 Centimeters per Second

> “Even though I know you won't be here If life can be repeated, I'll go to you many times over There's nothing else that I want Nothing else is more important than you” > > -Masayoshi Yamazaki, ‘One More Time, One More Chance’

There’s a stark difference between loving and losing versus being in a love destined to fail.

Do you know how it feels to hear your partner say “we’re doomed”?

This and many other memories flooded my head as I was watching Five Centimeters Per Second, and, unlike the manga which I was able to flip through with relative ease, this movie took me more than six pauses and a pot of coffee to get through. It shattered me. No, that’s not right - I was shattered before, and this movie reminded me of such.

Five Centimeters Per Second is an early work of Makoto Shinkai, a man who specializes in emotional tales spun with great music and greater backgrounds. It seems like he keeps making the same movie again and again - “boy meets girl but they cannot be together due to precarious circumstances” - but, before this storytelling pattern repeated itself ad nauseam, it was surprisingly satisfying in its simplicity. Either that, or I’m just knees deep in the throes of heartbreak, so I loved this a little more than per usual. Regardless!

Throughout Five Centimeters we follow a couple’s entire lives, specifically, their relationship with one another, segmented in three parts - elementary school, where their innocent love festered, primary school, with their parting, and adult life, as the couple must come to grips with their separation. And I say couple, but we focus on the boy, Tohno, who sacrifices so much and pines so hard for this past relationship, forcibly extending his pain for tens of years on end. His pain, thematically, is separated into parts too.

I - A fleeting, pure love

II - The inability to recapture that love

III - Grieving that loss of love

I mean, the entirety of Five Centimeters is a massive pity party mourning this loss, but it makes sense why he would. So many boundaries were overcome in this relationship, not only in distance, but emotionally: The couple, despite their youth, acknowledged their feelings for each other, their inability to be together, and separation in life, but still held onto their romance for as long as possible, despite the fact that they are destined to fail. It’s beautiful! But Tohno got trapped in that love, and never left.

It’s a cautionary tale.

“But that I should feel any resentment against you, Nastenka!…Good Lord, only a moment of bliss? Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of a man's life?”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, ‘White Nights’

Tohno romanticized this love lost, and redefined his entire life in lieu of chasing this ideal, an ideal that could never possibly be reached again.

He’s not the only character who does this, either.

In part two, we see another girl take interest in Tohno, and, notably, she completely defines herself by him, to the point where even her friends take note. This girl even turns in an empty career sheet because she’s unsure of where to go in life if it doesn’t have Tohno in it, even if her love is never reciprocated. Where have we seen this before? Right. Tohno does the same thing with his childhood love. Neither of them know how to define themselves outside of the other person. Neither of them knows their own definition outside of their love lost.

It’s all buttered up with beautiful montages, yes. Sweeping backgrounds, sakura blossoms and footsteps through snow conglomerate into a gorgeous picture, but this is, above all, a warning. In this expectation of a long history, in Tohno defining love as what he and his past love had, and by no other standard can love possibly exist, he brings out his own downfall. That’s the most tragic thing of them all: The man ruins himself. The manga expounds on this in the third part, as Tohno deliberates with his long-term girlfriend of four years on how he can never quite move on from this past love. His girlfriend wants to move things forward, but Tohno just can’t meet that, as he’s still stuck far back in the past, back with his first love. Tohno was too busy pining for what could have been instead of coming to terms with what was.

I was distracting myself from confronting Five Centimeters, time and time again, so I didn’t have to deal with the myriad of emotions it gave me. I played ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ on guitar, I cleaned my room, I made another pot of coffee, I wrote some shitty poems. Even these very notes I wrote were distracting me from the full weight of the movie, and the fact that I say ‘movie’ because of my own past love once telling one of my friends “Thank God you didn’t say film” tells you how much she still affects me.

To be honest, I’m scared that I did this, that I’m DOING this. Romanticizing a past love. I’m coming off the heels of a two-year friendship and a six-month relationship with someone that I knew so damned well. It was a big chunk of my life, a huge part of each and every day, and not having her here feels wrong. Empty.

Five Centimeters made me cry, made my chest cave in, made me keel over in my chair and stare at my own reddening eyes in the darkness of its end credits because it’s a wrapped up conglomerate of everything I can’t have. I can’t have her back, I can’t be on my own train to her, I can’t be where I’m supposed to, and I can’t save that love. It all coalesced into one massive compound of emotions and, halfway through the ending montage, I broke down.

“And if I could be who you wanted

If I could be who you wanted
All the time
All the time”

-Thom Yorke, ‘Fake Plastic Trees’

We’ll never meet.

That’s okay.

Maybe my heart doesn’t believe that right now, but it’s true, I’ll be alright.

When Tohno sees his past love gone, he smiles & does a heel-spin turn.

I should do much of the same.

Acceptance.

Maybe one day I’ll get there.

There’s a non-zero chance that the one I’m talking about is reading this, and, in the off chance that you are…well, hi. I have too much to say. I’ve written much, and cried more, listened to records of your voice until I could repeat your very cadence, held your pictures close, so close to my chest, and endlessly poured over messages. In the end, though, I’m glad it happened at all.

I’ll move on one day. If not now, then sometime, and I will learn to love again. And it won’t be with you, there’ll never be anyone else like you, you’re unique, you’re special, there’s only one of you in the world and I wish that you could be mine, but you can’t. But, one day, I will love again all the same.

To you:

I’ll remember you oh so fondly.

Thank you.

"maybe somewhere else i held my dried tears to your cheek as we kissed tenderly

in the somewhere else where we refused to let go"

-an excerpt from my poem, ‘never’, 8 Feb. 2024

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