Kimi to Houkago

I once believed that loving from afar was enough. To watch quietly without ever drawing close seemed the safest and most blissful way to hold onto affection. That distant gaze, I told myself, was love itself—and the happiest time I could ever know. But the hours I spent on the veranda slowly changed that certainty. In the stillness there, with only the open air and my own thoughts, I began to understand how wrong I had been. Love cannot remain forever at a distance, and the happiness I had clung to was not the whole truth. What I had taken for contentment was only a shelter from what I had refused to face. The veranda, once a place of quiet comfort, became where I finally saw that looking from afar was not the love I had believed it to be—and not the happiness I had once taken it for.