Author: Olavia Kite

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

—Walt Whitman

Silk

Indescribable beauty. Words being woven together like threads of silk to talk about silk. It’s hard to recover from this shock, so much beauty contained in 90 pages or so. It came in a bright green envelope, postmarked from Sweden. I can’t even write properly about it.

I devoured the book in about an hour. After I turned the last page and met that blank stare from the book that ended, I sat in silence in my room, images still dancing in my head. Paths and forests and eyes that meet. Eyes that meet. I’ve wandered those streets, I’ve heard those trees sing the wind. And yet they’ve been rendered magical by a hand thousands of kilometers away. I’m astounded.

Will I ever be able to ignite sparks from words like that?

Morning Has Broken

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.

1999

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.