I knew I would love The Garden of Words the moment I heard its name.

And then I read the synopsis and thought, "Surely, this can not get better." But for so long, I didn't watch it. Perhaps because I was afraid it might disappoint, but more likely because I knew what it was without having to see it, and I was afraid of how it would make me feel.

And now here I am, feeling it.

Whenever something really moves me, I immediately take to the internet to hear what other people have said about it, to try to make sense of the currents it sent through my mind and heart. So I read some reactions, some reviews. I read about the themes of lonely sadness, which upon reading I recalled as being mentioned in other Shinkai works, and about awkward maturity and about rain and uncontrollable passion.

And these resonated with me. I realized how I wasn't sure who I identified with more, the earnest fifteen year old boy who is my gender, or the lost twenty-seven year old woman who is my age. Awkward maturity, the idea that the twenty-seven year old woman, for all the years can feel and seem no more mature than the teenager, perhaps no more than she herself was as a teenager. I know it's not true of myself; I can conjure clear images of my younger self and the foolishness and the immaturity that led me here, but if one were to ignore age and put me and either of the main characters to scrutiny, I can't say I would appear the most mature.

But I know one thing that has matured in me is my concept of love. I sometimes feel that I ruined my first young love. It was supposed to be something of reckless abandon, fueled by passion and unfounded certainty in its truth and its future. But it wasn't that. It was that "koi", a love of lonely sadness. I couldn't have who I wanted, so I tried to love someone I didn't so I wouldn't have to feel alone without them. And so I envied these two, doomed though their love in the garden seemed to be. Because at least during their time in the garden, when the rain brought out their buried desires, they weren't alone.

So yeah, I just watched The Garden of Words. You should watch it too.