Author: Olavia Kite

What’s the use of all this sunlight if it’s not drawing squares on your neck? What’s the use of all this space if you’re not lying beside me?

I picture them floating through cylindrical black and white chambers, chasing flying food balls like amoeba, orbiting around a marbled cobalt blue hemisphere. In utmost silence they dive into the void—slow-motion underwater ballet for medieval knights—and fix a solar panel or weld an antenna.

Thousands of flickering lights—stars among the stars—surround a crumpled picture. A family of three: the little boy with missing teeth and a crew cut now wears his yellow sleeves rolled up and walks a pretty girl with a pink cardigan down the street. Heavy memories in weightless nights, comforting yet useless to confront the mystery of a deceitfully unwavering crystal ball. How does it feel to see it all—that godly omnipresence from the distant skies—and yet miss every milestone of your loved ones’ lives?

It is an undeniable feat, going where no one had dared to go before. People talk about these travelling heroes from their rocking chairs on cool verandas, watching their own children run and stumble on the grass. Meanwhile, there where they point with dreamy fingers, the loneliness within blends with the outside darkness, and no sun is strong enough to illuminate the spreading black ink of perpetual quietude.

I think I understand them, even though they’re nothing but a blurred sketch in my mind. I do—for in drifting away, I, too, have felt the weight of my heart compelling me back home.

My words don’t want to leave my mind.
Like motorbiker acrobats they roll around the inside of my head,
Crystal bingo ballots holding out for an ever-secret winner number.
My words yearn for endings in magenta and yellow.
But white is the most frightening of all beginnings,
And in panic and anxiety they roll and roll and roll.
It’s snowy out there:
A white sheet of paper has covered the fields with emptiness,
And no plum buds dot the air to signal the end of winter.
I am a cocoon, lazing on the junction of two bare branches,
Concocting petals in my entrails while asleep.
I could stay like this forever.
But if a single streak of sun slithers through a crack
—Not much more is needed
To let the icy blue skies drown my pupils—
My womb shall explode in a storm of magenta and yellow
Diffusing like fireworks on the coldness of the ground.
White is the most frightening of all beginnings,
And in hopes of flying, my words roll and roll and roll.