よるのあめ
てのひらのひかり
けしてぬれず
yoru no ame / tenohira no hikari / keshite nurezu
night rain / the light in my palm / never gets wet
We were sitting in a small café near the station, the kind that still plays old jazz through a single cracked speaker. The rain outside came in waves, soft and rhythmic, like it was trying to remember an old song.
He stirred his coffee, then asked, “What’s the most expensive thing you’ve ever bought?”
I laughed. “That’s easy. My phone.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Your phone? That doesn’t sound very poetic.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “That’s the problem.”
He waited. I could tell he knew there was more coming.
“It’s not expensive because of what it cost,” I continued. “It’s expensive because of what it took.”
He tilted his head. “What do you mean?”
I looked down at the screen between us. It was face-down, black, quiet — like a sleeping animal that could wake at any second. “I think it’s stolen most of my time from the last ten years,” I said. “Time I could’ve spent watching the world instead of photographing it. Time I could’ve spent feeling instead of documenting.”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds familiar.”
“It’s strange,” I said. “You buy something that promises connection, and then you spend years feeling slightly apart from everything. You scroll through people’s lives, you chase signals, you mistake vibrations for meaning. And by the time you look up, the day’s already gone.”
The rain outside grew heavier. Drops ran down the window in crooked lines. Each one caught the light for a moment, then disappeared.
“Do you ever wonder,” he said, “what we’d remember if we hadn’t spent so much time looking down?”
“All the time,” I said. “I think about all the small things I missed — the way light changes on a friend’s face when they laugh, the sound of footsteps on wet pavement, the smell of rain on metal. I traded all that for updates I don’t even remember.”
He leaned back in his chair. “You think it’s too late to change that?”
I smiled, though I didn’t feel like smiling. “No. But it’s like trying to unlearn a language you’ve spoken for too long. You can’t forget the words, only choose silence.”
We sat there quietly for a while. The café was half-empty now. The lights buzzed faintly, and the rain outside softened into a hum.
After a long pause, he said, “You know, it’s strange. Phones used to be about reaching people. Now it feels like they’re about escaping them.”
I nodded. “Maybe that’s the real price. Not the money — but the hours. The little fragments of ourselves we trade for the illusion of being everywhere, while slowly being nowhere.”
The barista turned the lights down. The rain stopped. The air felt lighter, but I couldn’t tell if that was relief or regret.
He finished his coffee and stood up. “So,” he said, “you going to sell it?”
I looked at the black screen again, its surface reflecting my face — two eyes, slightly tired, framed by the ghost of the café lights. “No,” I said. “But maybe I’ll start buying my time back.”
He smiled, almost sadly. “That sounds expensive.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The most expensive thing I’ll ever pay for.”
life 