
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.

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

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.

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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