“8th of March is the day of the rebellion of the working women against the kitchen slavery. Down with the oppression and narrow-mindedness of the household work!”
Author: Olavia Kite
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.
Have I been looking in the wrong direction all along?
He sleeps; I think of him. It has been pouring nonstop, and the streets become cluttered with cars and people soaked in misfortune. So they say. I cannot picture the wet chaos from my side of the world, for a raging wave of dry wind bangs on my window, an escaped convict desperate for refuge. The skin on my legs is dry and wrinkled, and suddenly I’ve grown old below the knees. Such a scene is unfathomable for someone resigned to sleep to the white noise of water. The heavy sensation of each other’s presence is unavoidable—memories linger on streets we have never walked together, words we’ve never spoken echo with a distinctive ring. But a quick move of the eye is enough to shatter the all-too-comforting mirage.
We may be like electrons, spinning on the same orbit of thinning hope, yet never meeting. We may be casting yearning looks at each other, stretching our arms out to pretend we can overcome a seemingly infinite diameter. It is the very force of our attraction that keeps us apart. Or—who knows, life keeps smirking at the jokes it plays on us—we may the fateful mismatch of an electron and a positron, and we are doomed to annihilation as we stride and stumble toward each other.
Perhaps I’m too naïve to grasp the risks we are running in our desperate quest. After all, who am I to understand particles? Swirling in eternal uncertainty, subject to forces we are barely able to identify—aren’t we all made that way? Maybe a sage will point out that this desire will lead us into utter destruction. But how can we call it destruction, if all we will become once we meet is light?