This picture is one that has been chosen to represent the song “Yūnagi” in the book “A Story About Between Illness and Migration”. Taken in Hiroshima on October 19, 2010, in a school that was left mostly unscarred by the atomic bombing and transformed in a hospital, those writings have been written by parents, sons, daughters, friends, loved ones, looking to find the ones they had lost contact with after the bombing.

And somehow, those writings on the walls, preserved still today, are the same ones we may write when we go through a storm, in hopes that someone will come and help us. They are also the same ones we may write when people who are dear to us are going through storms, in hopes they will see it and make it out, knowing they aren’t alone.

A few words go a very, very long way… And a storm always has an end.