Author: Olavia Kite

He always wakes up at the wrong hours, as if time were not a matter pertaining to him. Trapped in a bedroom with wooden floors by his own accord, he sings to himself.

He talks about TV as though he were encountering it for the first time in his life, and I love the fascination coming out of his pretty voice when he describes such a boring everyday thing. Enormously wide-eyed, he blushes when he hears my stupid jokes—but then he surpasses them, causing me to twitch my mouth in that silly bewildered face he finds so much fun to watch.

Our life together is a one-page story of dances through frozen food aisles, lost glasses, and strange findings of coins.

And yet, I’m starting to miss him.

Sometimes I ponder about love.

I caught a glimpse of love last summer. My camera froze a pair of faces smiling cheek to cheek under the midday sun, and there they are, looking at the world all dreamy from their perfect flat landscape. But here where we breathe and walk those mouths no longer smile, and if they do, they do on their own, submerged in different shades of blue. The magnet attached to my little heart seems too feeble to attract another one in order to beat together. Or maybe I’m stuck in a North-North situation: try as hard as you can, you simply cannot join two magnets if they’re not facing opposite poles. And I wish the metaphor made sense, but I’m always the opposite, never the same—yet I’m always repelling whatever moth approaches my flame.

Sometimes I think I’m meant to be alone forever. It doesn’t really strike me as a tragedy, as I have plenty of things to do on my own. I’ve got stories to write, and pictures to take, and drawings to make. However, sometimes I do wish for stupid things like cheek-to-cheek smiles. The kind that last. I wish for a North-South.

I guess, dear Olavia, that you are condemned to walk around with a pencil stuck in your heart.

Try wrenching it out—you’ll die within minutes. You will have to let it vibrate with every beat, accept it as a part of you. Perhaps if you let the graphite meld with your blood, one day you’ll be able to transfer your bruises onto paper. And if you can stand it, pain will have acquired a whole new meaning.

“What a delightful thing it is,” so ran my thoughts, “to have done with study! Now I may really enjoy myself! I know as much as any girl in our school, and since it is the best school in England, I must know all that it can ever be necessary for a lady to know. I will not trouble my head ever again with learning anything; but read novels and amuse myself for the rest of my life.”

This noble resolve lasted, I fancy, a few months, and then depth below depth of my ignorance revealed itself very unpleasantly!

Frances Power Cobbe, Autobiography (1894)