There is a black and white movie playing on the TV in front of me.

But other than that, everything is painted in various colors, including me and my parents.

"This is going to be a sad movie, I can already tell," says my mother, so much younger and thinner than the last time I saw her. She is wearing a lime green cardigan over a cream-colored shirt, blinking at the screen from behind her cherry red framed glasses. "Why don't you make our Jade watch something more enjoyable?"

"This ain't no sad movie, my dear!" my father retorts gleefully. The dark skin I inherited from him seems to be glowing golden. There is no mustache under his nose, nor any dark circles under his eyes, nor any crease in his brows. "It's a beautiful movie about life, about living, about what it means to be alive. Our Jade will learn so much from it!"

"Our Jade is seven, my dear."

"So much more life left to live," my father says with a smile, nodding agreeably.

It feels like a dream. I look down at myself, at my long, thin fingers and my long, thin legs. This is not the body of a seven-year old. But it certainly is the life of my seven-year old self. It is perhaps the life I saw with my rose-tinted glasses of innocence. The illusion of an ideal world: sitting down at the living room and watching a classic movie with my ever-so-loving parents.

So is it a memory, or is it the figment of a well-crafted imagination?

The movie begins. An old man is sitting behind a desk of an extremely busy workplace, bent over hoards of paper. The narrator in the background declares the man to be lifeless.

It reminds me of what Eli told me earlier today. "When I look at you, I realize that it's possible to tell only from someone's eyes how little desire they have left to live."

The old man goes to a doctor and finds out he has stomach cancer. Camera shifts to a younger man and a same-aged woman entering a house while talking about buying a new one for themselves. The room is dark. The man says he could use his father's retirement fund and pension money to do it, since his father can't take all that money to the grave anyway. The light of the room turns on, revealing the old man sitting on the floor.

My father clicks his tongue. "It's the same old song played all over the world, from time immemorial. 1950s or 2010s, it's all the same."

My mother sighs. "Even my own brother wanted to send Dad to the nursing home after he got diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I couldn't believe him. After all that money Dad spent to send him abroad . . ."

"It's for sure a cruel world." My father ruffles my hair. His hand is warm, which means his heart must be cold.

The old man stares at a photo of his dead wife. Loneliness radiates off the TV monitor. I watch the movie play out with a strange sense of detachment. My heart aches for the protagonist, but the ache itself feels distant, as though it does not belong to me. The movie characters are seeing each other in colors, but I'm seeing them in black and white. The movie characters are speaking in their mother tongue, I'm listening to them through translated subtitles.

How much of them is getting lost before reaching me?

The old man takes a trip down the memory lane. The rainy day of his wife's death, when his son Mitsuo was still a little boy he could hold in his arms. Time skip to the time the old man went to watch his son's baseball match where Mitsuo's failure turned the game in the opposite team's favour, but the man kept cheering for him. Fast forward to the old man and his Mitsuo in the hospital elevator, Mitsuo wrapped in a white cloth, looking up at his father's face, saying, You will be there with me, right?

Chaos explodes on the screen, the crowd screams as the soliders hop on the train and bid their families goodbye before heading to war. Mitsuo gets to say the word 'Father' once before losing him in the crowd.

As the train begins to leave, there begins the the low, heart-wrenchingly desperate background sound of the father repeatedly calling his son's name, the fear in his voice increasing every time he pronounces that word, trailing off in the end with a stretch. Mitsuo, Mitsuo, Mitsuo, Mitsuo, Mitsuo, Mitsuo, Mitsuooo...

Meanwhile, my father wipes his eyes. When I look at my mother, I find her looking at him with great pain in her gaze, and feel rather confused. A silent conversation triggered by the suffering of the movie's protagonist is taking place between the two adults sitting on both sides of me. They're not letting me in. I sit there confused and oblivious.

"We only realize how beautiful life is when we chance upon death," says the sleep-deprived writer the old man meets in a bar, as the two of them embark into the lavish entertainment districts with the intention of living. A huge smile blooms in the old man's face, bringing life into it instantly. But he still looks rather sad. Humans look lonely in black and white, even when they are smiling.

The sleep-deprived writer and the cancer patient play pachinko, eat at a crowded restaurant, drink at a gorgeous bar, tear through a crowd of prostitutes, buy a new hat, and finally reach an extravagant party seemingly out of The Great Gatsby. There, a man on the screen begins to tap his butter fingers on the piano as a woman begins to dance with baroque movements of her limbs. The old man requests a song named Life Is Brief.

"You two, this is it," says my father, standing up from the sofa. "This song is what this movie's all about. Honey, shall we dance to it?"

"It sounds like a sad little song with not an ounce of romance in it!" my mother replies with dismay.

"Oh come on!" My father takes her hand into his. "I'm sure Jade wants to see it too . . . oh? Falling asleep, dear?"

Indeed, there are magnets pulling down my eyelids, drowsiness engulfing me. The black and white screen begins to grow blurry and unfocused. A deep, croaked voice starts to sing from a deep corner of the heart. I struggle to keep my eyes open to read the subtitles, but manage only two sentences before darkness consumes me.

"Life is brief
So fall in love, maidens."

And then I wake up in my bed, cushioned under blankets, surrounded by plushies, and see a blurry view of a man walking into the room. Despite the blurriness, I notice the big smile on the man's face. I blink several times to make his image crystal clear, but it's like I'm watching him from the other side of a misty taxi window.

As I keep desperately blinking again and again, I hear him chuckle heartily as he tells me, "You missed out on the best part!"

Another blink, and I'm back inside the taxi. Now it's no longer a black and white movie, but rather a black and white reality. Every color has been drained away again, just like my heart.

And my face is so cold.

I bring my gray hand up to my eyes and find them wet. I try to laugh, but what comes out are a series of croaked groans.

Am I crying right now?

My breaths come out shaky, and I realize that I'm actually sobbing. I vigorously wipe my face, in complete denial. The cat sitting beside the driver's seat suddenly jumps up to the space between the two seats, right in front of the gear shift stick. It blinks at me a few times with its mysterious, cold gaze. Then it raises its paw and places it on my wet palm.

That breaks me even more. I press my forehead against the back of the driver's seat and sob loudly, my chest so tight that it might as well tear apart any moment. I can't breathe. Something is hurting too much. My hand squeezes the cat's paw, but it doesn't squirm away from me. With every sob, the tears overflow, my breath gets caught up, the pain deepens. Pain? I haven't felt pain in a long time. Is this how pain always felt like? I haven't cried in a long time. I didn't even remember how suffocating it felt to cry, that feeling of something throbbing and begging to be freed from inside your chest, the unbearable headache, nose filling with snot. I didn't remember anything. And yet . . .

"You missed out on the best part!"

Haven't I been missing out on the best part my whole life? Has there ever been a point in my life where I thought, I will never be happier than this?

So I try to think of a few possible examples, but there really aren't many.

The best part could have been the December I was 15, when an unforseen winter drizzle abruptly blessed the whole city and I walked through it under a white transparent umbrella while holding my mother's warm hand. We were going to buy steamed dumplings from the store down the street, and everything was so beautiful. But it wasn't the best part, because she got a call minutes later about her father's death.

It could have been the scene from that sunlit autumn afternoon when I kissed Eli for the first time inside an empty classroom, the electricity that coarsed through my veins, the feeling of weakness in my knees, the tremor in my hands. But it wasn't the best part, because he broke down into an agonizing fit of tears right after, as though my lips carried a poison of unimaginable sorrow.

The best part could have been the scene from that depressing and hopeless evening when I sat down with my laptop to find an email letting me know that I'd been accepted for my first job ever. But it wasn't, because it wasn't a job I was particularly interested in, and it was the lowest paying one out of all the ones I'd applied to.

Perhaps the best part could have been the day Eli popped up for the first time in five years in front of my doorsteps to let me know that he moved in next door and he's always going to stay by my side from now on. But it wasn't because having him in such close proximity felt more like a burden than a source of comfort.

Is that really it?

Ah, what a vain life I have lived. How utterly meaningless and uneventful. Not a single part worth reminiscing over, for I always fell asleep right before the best part.

Oh wait, I think I missed one in the middle.

I'm certain, that another scene having potential to be the best part of my life's movie was when I won a huge photography competition in the last year of highschool and came back home overflowing with excitement to tell my parents and see the look of pride in their faces. But it wasn't, because my father . . .

Stop, before you break down again.

The voice in my head is commanding. But it's only trying to protect me. 

The tears have dried, nostalgic sorrow replaced with the helpless feeling of desperately grasping for something that's right there but still failing. I let go of the cat's paw and it hops back to the shotgun seat, proceeding to rub its face against the window. The taxi takes a turn to the left, and we enter a fly-over bridge. Streetlights grow taller on both sides. As the taxi drives through them, I find myself blip in and out of their white radiance.

The black and white movie continues. It's impossible to know when the best part will arrive. However, I think I already saw the worst part.

Except I won't let myself remember it.

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The movie I described in this chapter is a 1952 movie named "Ikiru" (To Live) by director Akira Kurosawa, starring Takashi Shimura. I coincidentally bumped into this movie while writing this book, so this must be destiny. It is perhaps one of the most beautiful movies I have ever watched. My love for it can never be expressed into words.

The song mentioned in the chapter is named "Gondola no uta", original by Kanji Watanabe. I will share the song in a later chapter, where there is a whole scene based on it. I'm hoping it's going to be a lovely scene.