The Story Behind Hikari and Yami
I have depression. It first made its presence known when I was in middle school, struggling to deal with the changes I was going through. It only got bad enough that I needed medication while I was in high school. Despite this, it’s still something I notice every day.
This being the case, it’s easy for me to write darker material. If not for the movie Grave of the Fireflies, I might’ve only written dark, depressing poetry.
Grave of the Fireflies is one of the many movies from Studio Ghibli. It follows the story of a boy trying to take care of his little sister in Japan at the end of World War II. I’ve described it as having no happy moments, only slightly less sad moments. I left the movie feeling far worse than I had when I’d sat down. At that moment, I made a promise to myself to work to avoid leaving my readers feeling what I was feeling.
I wrote Hikari before Yami. At the time, I was riding another roller coaster of emotion for no particular reason. I got myself out of it by forcing myself to think positively and allowing myself to get lost in a poem. That poem became Hikari
But I want people living with depression to know that other people are out there like them. Ignoring feelings of depression isn’t good for me, and it’s not helpful for other people to think that it’s only them. I took my feelings of depression and poured them into Yami.
I often read poetry around my town, and whenever I read these two, I always read them together, Yami first, then Hikari. Yami, or darkness, shouldn’t be the end of the story. There’s always Hikari, or light, and I wanted to reflect that in these poems.
(It has occurred to me that people going through the archive might read them out of order.)
Finally, I chose the Japanese names because I like the sound of them. That’s it.
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