Usually the first time I go to a place, face to face with people I barely know, I feel an immense loneliness. I see myself reflected in the glass of the window while black gloom spread over me. I am tied by blood to no creature in this world. I could go anywhere, do anything. It's dizzying. Suddenly, to see that the world so large, the cosmos so black, the unbounded fascination of it, the unbounded loneliness… these days, I'm feeling it with these hands, these eyes. I’ve been looking at the world half-blind. –Banana Yoshimoto