Letters number one hundred and twenty-eight: The days go on

Dearest J,

I just finished reading Kafka On The Shore.  Don't think Murakami was one of the authors you read...? Not sure.

The album is out, the two-night concert was a success.  For a little while, of a few days, many friends and friends of friends talked about it.

It was all so overwhelming and gosh, I didn't know where my strength came from..

To work non-stop under the great stress of finishing recordings and organising the concert; of preparing myself for the concert: face my songs and the audience, and brave the enormous beauty of the 11-person ensemble for Restless Heart.

Yet I've lived.  I think I'm enjoying the fruits of my labour - my mind is pretty clear now for most part  - in the sense that I allow myself to sit back and enjoy the smallest and most important pleasure of being an artist now: the afterglow, the quiet afterglow.

Like today...

I woke up a minute before 8am, stayed in bed...slept a while more.  Woke up again a while later and drifted between reading Kafka and checking FB and sleeping more.  Got up finally at 10am.  I put some porridge to boil, hung up laundry, slowly stir fry some vegetables (long beans and broccoli), sautéed needle mushrooms, branched purple cabbage with olive oil and soy sauce, fried an egg.  I ate two bowls of porridge with the dishes, over the novel; I ate slowly and took my time to wash the dishes.  After lunch I treat myself further - reading on the sofa, not enough, I poured myself the Yozu sake I bought from Kobe.  I napped in between reading and finally finished the novel at 3pm.

What a life right.

Put all those months of rushing between gigs and recordings and late night meetings and rehearsals and deadlines and stress and sleepless nights and not eating well and getting skinny into perspective...

Every now and then, more so now that I can slow down pace, I think about you and wonder about all sorts of things.

Even though I move fast on my toes and sometimes too fast to catch a breathe, I always, often wondered why life would be if you're still around.

Would I have made the album?  Would I write songs?  Will we go to London together?  .....

What I know for sure is that if you were here when I make the album and concert, you'd be really happy for me and proud of it all for me.

Your parents and Mama came to the concert on first night.  I gave copies of my CD to Alex, Yan and your parents.  Your mom asked for 5 copies to sell for me.

The journey after this is pretty much...another chapter, I guess the chapter before and up to the point of concert was called "WORK IT".  What comes after this is perhaps "Make It Last"?

The memories of you will last for a long long time.  I like this conversation at the end pages of Kafka On The Shore a lot, put it down here for you:

"Are memories such an important thing?"

"It depends," she replies, and closes her eyes. "In some cases they're the most important thing there is." 

"Yet you burned them up." 

Forever yours,

B