I was just thoughts, just air. There was nothingness all around me. Was this what it was like to be dead? When you died, did you still sense everything going on around you, only it was happening so far away that you didn't care about it? You were floating through space and time, and nothing that happened to you mattered because nothing really could happen to you because you didn't exist?
If I look closely, I can almost see myself floating in my mother's palm. Yet, when I shut my eyes, I find a different image of my mother releasing me as we dance in the storm and twirl in separate circles that cause the water to ripple from us in widening rings which merge in one ebbing bracelet of waves where the borders of the quarry meet the water, far from the center where my mother and I continue to spin our bodies in the radiant sheen of lightning.
Why do you weep, child? We of the Floating World live only for the moment, giving all our time to the pleasures of cherry blossoms and snow and maple leaves, the calling of a cricket, the beauty of the moon, waning and growing and being reborn, singing our songs and drinking cha and sake, knowing perfumes and the touch of silks, caressing for pleasure, and drifting, always drifting. Listen, child: never sad, always drifting as a lily on the current in the stream of life. How lucky you are, Kiku-chan, you're a Princess of , the Floating World, drift, live for the moment. . . .