Could I love you in a world without sadness?

There are songs I want to listen to on summer nights.
Especially when I'm walking home alone.
The song is called 'Kacho Fugetsu'.

I feel happy when I look up at the sky and find a star.
Since I live in a fairly urban area, I can only see two or three stars at most.
I find those few stars and think about my future.

Will I eventually become so busy with my daily life that I miss seeing these stars?
Will I even forget to look up at the sky for a brief moment on my way home?
How will I feel when I realize that?

I want to remember.
Looking up at the sky, the thrill of finding a star, and that starry sky I saw with someone special.

I feel like I have a tendency to go out of my way to make myself sad.

For example, when I'm happy.
Let's see, like when I go to a concert of my favorite artist.
When I listen to my favorite songs and see them with my own eyes, thinking how happy I am, I feel sad at the same time.
It might be about the concert ending, or the fact that no matter how much I like them, my feelings will never reach them.
I should just purely enjoy the place and the moment, but I end up trying to feel sadness alongside the happiness.
I go out of my way to gather seeds of sadness and plant them right next to the happiness of that moment.

Another example is when I'm with someone I love.
When I think about how glad I am to have met this person and wish we could be together forever, I simultaneously feel sad thinking about a future where we might not be together.
People's hearts change, and no one knows what the future holds.
Thinking about that, I realize there is no such thing as 'forever,' and that makes me sad.
People around me tell me, 'It's no use thinking about that' or 'You should just enjoy the present,' and I think so too, but I just can't seem to do it.

Come to think of it, my 'happiness' might have always been accompanied by 'sadness'.
Maybe everyone else is like that too?
Are 'happiness' and 'sadness' really at opposite ends of the spectrum?
They might be closer than I think.

In any case, I feel like I have enjoyed happiness through sadness.
Just as we can be grateful for peace because war exists,
I think I can feel happiness because sadness exists.

But even so,
even if the emotion of 'sadness' is necessary for my 'happiness',

a 'sadness' is still just a 'sadness,' and it is inevitably a negative emotion.

That is where the lyrics of 'Kacho Fugetsu' ask me a question.

If it were a world without 'sadness,' could people love one another?
If I were to discard 'sadness,' saying I don't need negative emotions, what would I be able to feel?

The reason I think 'I love' my partner is because I feel sad when I imagine the two of us breaking up.

When I feel sad thinking about what if we broke up, I realize that I love my partner.

This is something that could not be done if 'sadness' did not exist in this world.

If there were no sadness.

When I lose someone important, what should I think?
How would I even come to cherish someone in the first place?

If there were no sorrow.

What would I have been able to feel on that day?
The day we drove the car together to go see the stars.
I stole a glance at your profile as you looked up at the sky and cried a little.
Going to see the starry sky with the person I love was something I had always dreamed of, but when the moment finally arrived, my chest felt tight for some reason.

How many more times will I be able to make my dreams come true with you like this?
If by some chance we were to be together for a long time, what would I do if you were to die before me?
If it makes me this sad, why did we ever meet?

Thinking about that, I realized how happy I was.

Everything, absolutely everything, was something I could never tell you even if my life depended on it, so I hid my tears.

There was no moon out that night, and instead, there were so many stars it felt like they were overflowing.

Perhaps I am hating you at the same time that I love you.
While I am happy to be with you and wish to be happy together,
at the same time,
I feel like somewhere inside me, I am wondering why we met, and why you fell in love with someone like me.

But I feel that "loving" and "hating" are not so far apart from each other.

A summer night returning home with "Kacho Fugetsu" as background music, thinking of that night.
As long as I keep listening to this song, I don't think I will ever forget the light of the night sky.

The end