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Lunch break. You open your phone.
Someone who joined the company the same year as you has posted a photo: dinner out with the boss.
Your chopsticks pause, just a little.
You can’t help comparing
There’s one in your cohort who picks things up fast.
There’s one who was placed in a good department.
There’s one whose name the boss already knows.
You know it would be better not to compare.
But you compare anyway.
Maybe that’s just how it is, in the years when the future can’t be seen yet.
No map yet
In the meeting room, a senior colleague spreads out the documents.
You don’t even know what to ask.
You’re taking notes, but you’re not quite sure what you’re noting down.
The colleague beside you is already asking questions.
Afterward, you stand in front of the restroom mirror.
“What am I even doing?”
That thought was there, on the face in the glass.
On nights of frustration
The way home after a day that went badly is long.
Watching your reflection in the train window, you replay that moment again and again.
I should have done it that way.
Why, back then—
There are nights when, even at home, sleep won’t come.
Under the covers, staring at the ceiling, you go over it again.
Nights like that come again and again.
There are people like that at the pool hall
There are people who have kept coming to the pool hall for years.
At first, nothing would go in, one of them says with a laugh.
But now, when that person steps up to the table, the room goes a little quiet.
How many years did it take?
How many thousands, how many tens of thousands of shots?
In that person’s game, all the time they have put in seeps through.
Some people keep getting better as the years pile up.
Someone who thought “it’s too late” finds, one day, that something has shifted.
Perhaps the ceiling isn’t something anyone else gets to decide.
Only the time you’ve put in knows
There are nights when the balls won’t drop.
However many times you set up again, it doesn’t work.
Out of the corner of your eye, the player at the next table runs out cleanly, and you miss again.
Still, you come back. You shoot again.
No one has to be watching.
Only the table knows.
In that repetition, something changes, little by little.
The time you’ve put in can show up in the way the balls move before it ever shows up in words.
You close the phone on your lunch break.
The afternoon meeting begins.
Tomorrow, you’ll come again.
The time you’ve put in stays somewhere.
It just can’t be seen yet.
👉 More on working backward, and pool
👉 See the Yokohama Billiard Hall Guide
