Author: Olavia Kite

Silence. Hundreds of eyes look at me to find walls at a longer distance. I tried to speak earlier this morning, but a hollow whistle came out instead of my voice, and it was disregarded as a whimsical current flowing through a narrow hall. I’ve already begun to turn yellowish and transparent. Mirrors seem to be whispering my presence, and I cling to them as if an imprint were to remain where I once stood.

My skin is turning into a thin crust of liquor puris and dead cells. Underneath it nothing remains: there is no snake crawling out of the rejected coating. I cannot take a bath anymore, lest the water turns me into a giant hangnail. The wind will blow tomorrow morning and this body will be reduced to a floating swirl of repulsive flakes.

Whoever dreamed of fooling the laws of physics never felt the need to be acknowledged as a human being.

The European couple drag their suitcases along the road, clinging to their backpacks. They’re tall and thin, much like the yellowing trees beside them. Not a single smile is drawn on their faces.

The European couple cross the bridge on their bicycles, on their way to who knows where—the library, most probably.

The European couple sit on a bench outside the library. I can see them from the window as my fingers feed words into a white keyboard. I’m hungry. The girl wears a small dishwater blond bun on top of her head. Or maybe that’s the guy. Or both. They look alike, except that he is much taller than her, and scruffy blondish hairs cover his face in patches.

The European couple pass me by at the library entrance. The guy smells like summer chased him with water and soap but he was faster. I wonder how the girl can cope with that. She wears a long skirt and rather short stockings. They’re holding hands. They move their lips, but I can’t hear their voices; I don’t know what language they speak, where they come from. I don’t know why they’re here, or how long they’ll stay. I don’t even know if they really are European.

For some strange reason, I’ve been running into this pair of unknown people almost every day for the past few months. Meeting them, watching them for a brief moment before getting lost in the crowd is encountering the dramatization of a wish of mine for the future. A pair of bikes, a pair of interlinked hands. A familiar face at the other side of the window, glancing at me, waiting for me to look up and say hello. The discovery of far-off lands in company.

But it is their life I’m witnessing, not mine. As I realize this, my eyes lose grasp of their presence. It won’t be hard for them to vanish from my mind once again—the usual elements of a landscape are so easily forgotten!

Looking away, I’m bound to resume my activities in this world of odds, of lonely prime numbers.

Among the countless saints in the Catholic calendar, Santa Rosa de Lima (Saint Rose of Lima) is a truly frightening example of extreme penance. Her insatiable urge for mortification led her to wear a metal spiked crown concealed by roses and an iron chain around her waist. As if this weren’t enough, she built a bed of broken glass, stone, potsherds, and thorns, where she would lay when she could no longer stand. “She admitted that the thought of lying down on it made her tremble with dread” (Wikipedia).

There is absolutely no point of comparison between a pious woman who spends about fourteen years in extreme voluntary pain and a somewhat cowardly student who stares at her gigantic violaceous toe in utmost fear of having a broken bone. She even gets it X-rayed to discard major injuries. Nevertheless, despite the unimportance of her wounds, she tends to feel her stomach tumble with fear at the mere thought of having to ride her new bicycle again. Another bruise to add to the collection? Another opportunity to watch T-cells in action, live?

I learned today that Bob Marley died of a broken toe. Okay, it was cancer, but the origin was an untreated wound on his hallux (big toe). I heard this from my sempai (one of those European-looking Colombians—can’t decide whether he’s good-looking or not) while waiting to be called at the bank, of all places. Well, history states that Bob Marley got a melanoma from a soccer wound, but his religion didn’t let him have the toe amputated (a man shall not be dismantled, is the idea), so the cancer metastasized to his brain, lungs, liver, and stomach. The sempai didn’t tell me all that, of course; he just talked an untreated soccer wound which turned into cancer and killed him because he wouldn’t get it amputated. The rest is Wikipedia.

The process of learning how to ride a bike is not limited to the numerous tries that lead to finally maintaining once’s balance on a mechanism which has not been fully explained by physicians. There’s also the gaining of confidence on a slim vehicle that looks like it will collapse at once and could never hold someone straight up, let alone carry them to places, so how the heck it’s supposed to take me safe and sound uphill and downhill is beyond me (and many other, much more educated people). And yet, I must trust it! No matter how many times I fall, crash, or scratch, I simply cannot give up. The pain will go away eventually, but the bike will still be there next morning, quietly standing in front of the dorm, waiting to be unleashed. Untamed beast with double suspension, I can’t help but free you, and together we glide into the dangerous world of reckless riders and semi-destroyed paved roads.

I decided not to ride my bike today… and I missed it. I’m sure Santa Rosa wouldn’t have thought the same of her bed.

Thinking of endings is not so painful when they haven’t sunk deep in your heart yet. There is no clear future, anyway, so it’s not as if there had been a substantial change. The present from now on, that’s what changes… Come to think of it, even foggy things are subject to violent transition.

The worst endings are those which you’re unsure of. Is it over? I’ve written the last full stop to this story, but… so much more can be written on the subject, so many words can still come out of the hero’s lips. Yet, not all of them will be pleasant. Well, you don’t write anymore when you’ve already had a happy ending. After all, nobody wants to know how Prince Charming ran out of milk one morning and blamed it all on the Princess, who used the opportunity to show her husband the lipstick stains on his purple cloak and the very white (albeit rough) palm of her hand. But this is no happy ending, nor its epilogue.

This time I think I’m sure. I think. You see? I’m not sure. I’ve blabbered once again, and it’s all due to this sort of self-imposed silence. I wish I could turn this heart of mine into something useful, but I just let it pump words out, sealed in my body. Characters go astray as they navigate scarlet torrents in search for tissues to nest in. There goes a T, anchored in the diaphragma, causing me hiccups. And that A has found its way to pierce a thigh and generating an uneasiness when I walk. And that O, so round, spinning in my brain, slowly cutting through bravery and turning bicycles into untamed dragons. If only blood-letting were still practiced,… I’d gladly give my leg to the literary leech and watch as an old porcelain bowl fills up with blood and tears and feelings and thoughts.

The end. It doesn’t hurt so much when the audience in the cinema remains in front of the silver screen, waiting not for the sequel but for the same movie to resume. Nevertheless… is anybody planning to call the boy at the projector to tell everyone that the show is over? And if they did, what then? What is a lone cinema enthusiast to do with his time and a pair of empty pockets?

Perhaps, around the corner, the lonely movie-goer will bump into that bashful girl who was sitting beside him all through the show. And maybe, after a few seconds of awkward silence and fleeting glances, he will recognize in her the beautiful heroine the whole theater was cheering at. We’re not all what we seem. We’re not all what we pretend to be. We’re so much more (and much better) than that.

The end.

Somebody please turn on the projector and let us know what will happen to the handsome young man after he tells his inconsolable lover that she must believe him when he says things are getting better—because, come to think of it, they are.