Author: Olavia Kite

This feeling has been resting quietly in my heart like a young tapeworm. It should grow without me ever noticing,… except that I feel it feeding itself upon my inner tissues, drinking my blood, leaving me with ghastly cheeks and eyes that gaze nowhere.

I’ve felt alone numerous times, but abandoned… abandoned at the edge of the world, that’s how I feel. Sometimes I’m scared of the emptiness around, as if all left to see from my balcony were sheer black.

This so-called town, this agglomeration of dorms—It’s so close to Tokyo, and at the same time so far… However, I don’t know anymore if Tokyo is what makes me happy. I’ve walked its streets for hours, I’ve seen the sunset reflected on myriads of windows, I’ve been surrounded by flocks of salarymen flowing out of enormous stations,— and yet, the awe begins to feel incomplete.

It is time to set sail for new horizons. Golden Week in Kansai, here we come!

She told me she had just come back from Narita, where she was sending off her friend to Korea. I fell silent, keeping the day’s events —the roller coasters, the sushi, the long walk back home— to myself. As I stared into her face I realized how little I had strived to transcend the stage of mere hellos, how questions and comments flourished in my mind but never made it to my tongue. I would have loved to know her more, yet words had always failed me. Even then, on the brink of the last goodbye, I was left looking uninterested and unfriendly, letting out muffled screams into a mask out of which she had never been able to see me.

I’m so sorry. And yet, you will never know it, for I am still being selfish enough to translate my feelings into a language other than our lingua franca.

죄송합니다. I hope life entitles me to another chance.

There is a new presence in my room. Tall, slender, smooth skin waiting to be touched on the bed… or the chair, or the floor—who cares about places when the remedy for madness has come home with me this morning. I can’t believe I waited so long to bring happiness back into my life, to break the deadly silence that was already eating my heart away ever so slowly.

Unfortunately, my new companion cannot rub my cold feet in the night or interrupt an absorbing solitary activity with a kiss. I’ll have to wait a long, long, long time to meet the one who’s in charge of that.