The Foreign Language Center at the University of Tsukuba has kindly accepted some of my writings for publication at their journal. Here are the links to the pdf files for you to read. They’re under my real name, which I’m not really happy about but oh well. I hope you enjoy them.
tear my hair away
shrink me into perfection
make me a woman
It starts this way.
Silence, like a blank paper, gives way to a faint trace of whispers. My swift steps into the station. I’m boarding the victory train—an escape from nonexistence. Her music is coming with me, diving into the white, digging hope out of the void. Looking for you. Her watercolor voice paints a deep turquoise river for me to follow, and we glide under the light traversing the brush-like branches. She’s drawing an enormous stone bridge that could’ve held carriages and white wigs if it weren’t a product of this now that she’s talking about. A now long gone. She speaks of towns whose names I am bound not to remember, empty stations waiting for no one. Her voice is placing houses on the mountains, and I’d swear it’s just a painting if I didn’t see cars moving in the distance. You promised you would buy me Arabian sweets. You promised you would take me shopping for cheese. She sings about these promises—about a hand in the dark walking me through an impossible tunnel, about the blue sky and the tree against the window. She sings about a russet hill touching the horizon, and about you forgetting my name. I’m expectant. I wonder how you look like standing on the platform—but I cannot find out. I’ve listened to this song so many times, yet it always runs too short. In hopes for a faint glimpse of your face I play it over and over. Return to point zero. Dashing into the station. I’m riding that train forever: we will never meet again.