Have I been looking in the wrong direction all along?
Author: Olavia Kite
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?
I’m so terribly tired of this creative crisis. I haven’t written a story in years. I started to write something sort of fun right before leaving for Japan. And then, nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Some people ask me to write, but there is something behind me, a deep voice telling me that nobody would want to turn a page full of letters originally scribbled by this boring caricature of an aspiring writer. My punching of keys is not fruitful. I stare at the walls of my apartment in search for something beyond the white patterns. Then another day dawns and I look for the sky in search for blue, for colors, for anything to be worthy of being read years later. Maybe this fear of writing is just as my fear of speaking. Maybe I’m not too different from that girl from the TV show who was an amazing model yet let her nerves get on to her and failed to deliver. My words are my enemy. I live surrounded by daggers, I spit them, I bleed from my tongue, and I’m terrified to feel my entrails being slit at the same time as I yearn to see the shining silver when it finally catches the light.
I am so scared of wasting my life in this state of nothingness. I am nobody. I certainly am nobody, having learned nothing from these years in confinement. The autumn leaves turn crimson red, fire and wind and the sky and who the hell am I if but a student who never pays attention in class and wishes for a story yet never has the courage to sit down and write it? All I ever talk about in my writings is myself. Me, me, me. I am Mariana, stretching herself in her blue velvet gown, completely sure that nobody ever will come up to the tower where she spends her days. Oh, Millais, that woman you painted was not her, it was me! Let me stretch my back once more, my hips hurt, my heart aches. This is not life—it’s just some program resembling life where you wake up, walk, feed yourself and occasionally share a laugh with another character. It’s like Mario Bros. Mario walks straight ahead within that world, jumping and bumping, apparently having a blast in his adventure, yet there is no possibility for him to move out of his designated realm. Mario is not a hero. Mario is bored out of his mind to walk over the same brown soil, catching the same old mushroom from the same old brick block, listening to the same insane background music (like that idiotic background music from the bakery at school), moving forward yet always coming back to an indefinite beginning.
I need something to remind me that I’m still a human being and not just some pixel blotch. Look at me! Can you see me? Can you see this thing I wrote? Does it mean anything to you? No, it does not, for it doesn’t exist. It’s part of this program I’m trapped in, and you were expecting it. You know it by heart, and you’d like to skip it. Press the reset button and your path will inevitably bring you back to the point where you’ll be able to read it all over again.