Author: Olavia Kite

Tiny brown imperfect spheres roll and roll on the desk.
They come to a dizzy stop,
Greeted by the light from the lamp,
Looking like gracious
Opaque pearls, like miniature
Polished dinosaur egg fossils.

It takes less than twelve seconds to turn
Views into memories,
Reflected light into
A subtle crunch.

The joys of life.

Chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Chocolate with crushed almonds
Like a seductive piece of
Plywood,
Bitter chocolate with sweet bits of orange,
Chocolate-flavored
Powder
Refusing to melt
In a bowl of cold milk.

Precious maroon liquid
Flowing into a paper cup
In cold metal hands,
Bashful boxes pucker up—
Give me a kiss,
Give me everything you’ve got—,
They die quenching a yearning
No Aztec king could picture
In the bitter seed trade.

Tiny imperfect spheres roll and roll in my mouth.
It takes less than twelve hours to turn
Memories into pain,
Beautiful opaque pearls into
Regret and flab.

The joys of life.

I feel an incredible urge to write. I don’t need to think, just write away, no matter how poor the grammar might come out, how evident the lack of practice might seem when read. And yet, I still pause and wonder whether I’m using the right words or if I can stop mixing Japanese terms with the suffix -ness. My room smells like burnt food, the window is open and cool wind comes in. I’ve mopped the floor, but it seems to need further cleaning. It’s a cell, it’s home, it’s the beginning of a long journey.

I’m so much better than this, yet I have neglected so much of myself at the sight of endless effort. What for, I wondered, and only now that it’s too late to wonder I find the answer. There’s a voice in the back of my head telling me results could’ve been better, if only I had put more effort to it. Effort, effort, effort. Everything here is about effort.

I think of effort and my mind flutters away, a butterfly and its graceful dizziness stumbling over endless afternoons of Hawaiian bread and tangerine juice, over plump juicy peaches, over hot chocolate on Sundays, over my sleeping head on his lap in the bus.

I cannot write without thinking. I cannot help but overthink, overfeel, let the sights and sounds crush my shoulders and reduce me to a ball of insecurities and what-ifs. Why is writing my favorite pastime if it’s so painful? Why do I want to make a living out of a rather masochistic activity? The quest for the perfect word, the neverending process of learning a language and not letting go of a couple more, the untimeliness of ideas… Is this what I want to do with my life? It seems so, although my excessive nonchalance speaks the contrary.

If I can’t make it I can go back, I can always go back, I have people waiting for me. But I cannot afford to quit. This is not the end of the road, and this road is so much more than an adventure to get a couple of pictures and souvenirs. Maybe I should go back to coherence, to being consistent with my dreams. Or rather than that, I should remember that I do have dreams, and that this very chair I’m sitting on is the realization of a dream I believed unattainable.

The lonely fields of Tsukuba are nothing but the mental pictures I used to smile at when walking into the morning sun, out of a building whose eleventh floor waited for me every two weeks with paper dinosaurs and still dancers trapped in glass cages.

We visited Tsukuba this Sunday.

The train ride was expensive yet fun. After the last agglomeration of houses disappeared, the landscape started screaming ‘Midwest’. Excuse me, ma’am, is this Highway 67? I think we got lost on our way to St. Louis…

The fun was suddenly truncated when we found ourselves exploring the University’s neverending campus and desolation became evident. Neon green slime bubbled on the surface of what seemed to have been a fountain decades ago while a lonely cherry tree was stripped from its unusually early beauty by the dirty brick buildings surrounding it and the undeserving reflection on the turbid pool where carps made their way through brown curls dancing like solid threads of cigarette smoke.

And then, the dorm. “Do not walk this path on your own at night,” was our welcome sign into the dormitory area, which felt like an abandoned world in sepia. A landscape drenched in monochrome sadness, an atmosphere of utter despondency, the last stage of a slow nightmare set inside a vintage photograph of naked trees and still waters.

I need to take some serious measures if I don’t want my head to fall into the darkest pits of depression after moving into the dorm.

Today has been our last day of class at the Japanese Language Center. What seemed like a numb routine stuck forever in a scratched vinyl record is suddenly over.

Is that good or bad news?