The month of puppy love.
I found myself reading through some old assignments from last year, and I stumbled upon an old story I read by Haruki Murakami, called “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl”.
It was this story that simply made me fall in love with Murakami’s work. Murakami openly expressed that he simply decided to become a writer one day, for “no reason”… but something about his work is so serine. He has a way of expressing his thoughts and emotions in such a clear tone. You’d expect perhaps, from someone with such a beautifully artistic name, to write dramatic stories about love, and dive deep into the message behind love.
But Murakami does a fascinatingly amazing job at explaining the concept of love, in such a simple manner.
His short story “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl” looks at the situation where a boy and a girl pass by each other on the streets of Japan. The boy feels a sort of similarity to her, but cannot quite pin his finger on why he felt drawn to her. According to him, she is not “anything special”, she’s just your typical, every day girl, but for some reason, she was his 100% perfect girl.
By the time they had passed each other, it hit him. This was a girl he met many years ago. They met in April, and they decided to leave their love to fate: If they were 100% meant to be together, they’d bump into each other again, right?
They bumped into each other, perhaps, but perhaps it was not fate… they crossed paths, never to speak again, the boy feeling nostalgic and regretful for not approaching her, and the girl, well, her side of the story wasn’t exactly explained: maybe Murakami will come up with a part two to this piece.
The point that I want to get to, is that Murakami’s piece kind of explains April and the emotions that come with it in the simplest way possible.
Perhaps I’m not the only one that’s been there? When you meet someone at the beginning of spring, when all the flowers around you and nature comes back to life. This new person, these new emotions, have you feeling renewed, and the type of love you feel in April is so… soft.
Pet Boone’s song “April Love” also does a fine job of looking at the case of April love. April love, it can be very young, it can easily slip away from the tips of our fingers. It’s fresh and makes us feel “tingly” inside; perhaps it’s one of the most refreshing feelings that can come along with spring.
Of course, April love doesn’t have to correlate solely to the emotion of love, that being in a romantic sense. April hosts its own sort of feeling of “freshness”, one that is rather unique. You can feel the softness of spring outside, and you can see the people and animals all around you filled with a new bounce, a sort of spring in their step follows them wherever they go.
April is the softest month of the year, and simply hearing songs written about this month, or reading works about finding love in April have me feeling all sorts of ways about spring’s arrival.