“Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is “is the universal lie”
It’s the “chief” Paloma’s thought and the main reason why she has decided to die. She was sure that life is just the bustling and this truth becomes clear only when a person grows up. So, why does she has to wait for this opening till she will be an adult, while she can die being still in the dark. But having become friends with Kakuro and Renee, she changes herself and at the end of the story chooses searching for “beauty in this world” instead of death.
“Maybe that’s what life is about: there’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same.”
One of the final sentences of the story is like a conclusion of it. There was nothing special and outstanding in life of the characters in the house number 7. Everybody lived a gray and common life. But with the appearing of Japanese everything changed, especially in the lives of the protagonists: the man was that moment that flipped everything upside down, Paloma and Renee were no longer offish ones: they opened themselves to the man. He was a kind of their savior, he “pulled” them out from themselves. And almost in everybody’s life becomes that moment: whether it is a person, some event or even thing; that stands out of everything and changes everything.
