Author: Olavia Kite

This is the time of the year when the moon is the roundest, they say.

The world keeps getting older, some humans make their debut onstage, some others leave. Today is an important day for some, today is a sad day for some, today is just another day. It’s another day and the moon is so beautiful.

Montserrat Caballé sings a lullaby and makes me want to cry. How I wish life weren’t supposed to be reduced to a couple of books, but I know I could make this so much easier on myself if I didn’t think of it as a burden, if I didn’t associate it with the monotonous, arrow-like lifestyle that pervades this dormitory.

I’ve been thinking too much today. When will I finally give myself a break?

1. We attend the same class. My seat offers a perfect view of his, and vice versa. He knows when I don’t want to answer the teacher, and I notice when he finally laughs at a common joke. However, it’s all the same as if we sat in different classrooms. Last night I ran into him at the cafeteria. “What a pleasant surprise”, he exclaimed with a wide smile. We ate together and talked with delight, as if the distance between us were soon to become, once again, kilometric.
2. Today, for the first time, I saw a young shaven-headed Japanese man. I couldn’t help staring.

And I don’t feel like studying. However, much to my surprise, I don’t feel depressed at all in this weather. Perhaps it’s because a) it feels a lot like back home, b) this is not winter yet, and c) I slept really well last night.

Coffee/tea/hot chocolate and biscuits, anyone?

I like to ask you about things I already know over and over. I review your invariable answers, intact memories piling up against my window until they break free and force me to start a new collection, a new old question. So many of them have flown that now I find your echo written on the sky, on the leaves that fall, on a sudden inexplicable smile during the darkest of noons.

Over an oozy stream of nightly silence my eardrums vibrate to serene waves which once flowed from your sweet mouth. I’ve seen your still face on a screen; your eyes of quiet forest have crossed twilight and caressed my weary heart. Is this image enough to remember the feeling of a kiss?

I hear you—you see me moving from a morning which has not dawned for you yet. One day the sun will touch our foreheads from the same angle, and I’ll ask you something silly, like the possibility of rain or what happened to the fast food stand which used to be on that corner. Let words or lack thereof trickle then into the space between us. And when that space is no longer possible, let new sounds and sights shine away into a broken horizon, well over the indigo mountains, waiting to reverberate on the cold concrete wall of another lonesome morning.