Author: Olavia Kite

I love dawn. Everything starts anew from a touch of gold on the grass, a quiet fire in the sky. Being able to see sunrise from my window is one of my favorite things about this apartment. Sometimes I even get up early just to see the horizon come alive; I’ve been doing it quite often since I moved in here. The sight was even soothing in times of internal murk. I may have been left alone in a snowstorm all right, but the beauty of daybreak never failed.

I’ve been fixing things lately. The feeling of plenitude that struck me amid the water in Waikiki doesn’t seem to be leaving, and I’m glad it has managed to stay. All it took for the clouds to dissipate was a couple of huge decisions on the course of my life. When I met Prof. Lambert to discuss a few of them, I knew I was taking a huge step away from the shadows. Career prospects, foreign languages, what to do with my slowly reawakening creative drive, everything seems to have fallen into place all of a sudden. Who knew that staring at a radiotelescope could be so effective?

This weekend I went to Shibuya to meet one of my best friends and her boyfriend. We gathered at an Irish pub and ate shepherd’s pie and apple crumble. Then we walked around the familiar streets which had become so alien to me. Suddenly I realized that I was enjoying it pretty much like during my first days in Japan, when I would venture out of language school after class to walk around these packed streets and stare at all the little details decorating the whirling crowd. It’s like the world is coming back to shape, sunshine hitting strong again, a fresh coat of paint on this faded landscape.

It’s like daybreak after a long, cold night.

We are, all of us, alone
Though not uncommon,
In our singularity.
Touching
We become tangent to
Cirles of common experience
Co-incident,
Defining of collective tangency
Circles
Reciprocal in their subtle
Redefinition of us.
In tangency
We are never less alone,
But no longer
Only.
—Gene Mattingly

I’ve been looking for this poem for exactly ten years, after I found it in my geometry book in high school. Wow, has it really been that long? I was fifteen and I practically owned two of the whiteboards in my classroom. Every day I’d write a quote on one of them, and the other one I simply used to draw whenever I pleased. I used to draw cartoons of my friends, from which I planned to make a series called ‘The Zoo’. I don’t know where the name came from, it simply did. One of my friends still talks about it with me.

I was already Olavia Kite back then. When I came up with the name I thought I’d use it for a character in a story, but I liked it so much that I decided to keep it for myself. Olavia Kite. The Beatles reference is obvious. My parents gave me a calligraphy pen with the pseudonym engraved on it for my fifteenth birthday. They knew it would stick forever.

That was the year I travelled out of the country for the first time. Chicago shined with a splendor that made me promise myself I’d go back to see it closely—and I did, three years later. I didn’t realize back then that my dreams tend to come true, so I wished away.

1999 was also the year Clown committed suicide. He had a deep voice, I still can remember it pretty clearly, even though his face has faded. He was one of those online acquaintances who marked my teenage years. I may have been isolated when younger, but I never was completely alone. I guess the same thing applies now that I’ve embraced Tsukuba solitude.

Ten years have passed, and memories flow like water from a broken pipe. I can’t even organize them, all soaked in reminiscence.

My heart looks like an oyster. An open oyster, a big mouth waiting for a little bit of debris to fall inside in order to turn it into a milky pearl. Stuck in the silky sand, it beats in a perpetual gasp, facing the blinding turquoise and the fleeting silhouettes of fish. I’ve tried filling it with words, but they run like blobs of ink in the water. Words will never cake in this soft, pink, hungry surface. Yet they’re all I have, so I keep pouring them in hopes that something will stick. An image, a promise perhaps.

There go my memories of things yet to happen. Watch them leave me as they dilute into the ocean, see their graceful volute flight.