Maia Nebula!

The lights. The stars. The jingles. Red and green. Everywhere.

It’s been hardly a couple of days since a feeble attempt to recreate Halloween took place, and Christmas is already in the air. Already—! In November!!!

Maybe it’s because we don’t have falling leaves nor pumpkins nor apple cider that we get Christmas so soon. We have nothing to entertain our minds with while the green/red hullabaloo arrives. We ignore what it feels to have the cold breeze blowing out the candles of summer, rain being replaced by thousands of feather-like vegetable flames. Days are endless, identical twins succeeding each other, an infinite army of time.

We need Christmas to get out of our routine, to see old faces which seem new every year, to change the appearance of our houses in order to start anew in January… The same old routine with a brand new face— or is it a new routine there where we’ve always been?

All I know is, it’s too early for the firs to be chopped down. If only we had little squirrels to chase those non-existent winter blues out of our minds…

Double major? Single major? Master’s degree? Dropout?

Literature? Languages?

Two years? Four years? Six years?

English? Japanese? Chinese?

A translator? A writer? A teacher? A housewife?

Colombia? United States? Japan?

Oh, time, what have you hidden under your sleeve?

Olavia Kite is the worst writer alive.

She used to think she really had talent, thus deciding to major in Literature. However, she missed a tiny detail… She would not like her major! She would lose her horizon and think about becoming a globetrotter/language teacher instead of gaining worldwide fame with her amazing art, which would not amaze the most curious passerby.

But lo, behold! She has not lost her hopes! She has decided to write a novel in thirty days… just because. She found out there was an opportunity to do it and show everybody how sucky she is, and she will not lose that opportunity!

Join her in her sorry attempt to justify herself as a starving anonymous writer. Beginning November 1, 2004, don’t forget to check this blog and lend her your support.

She says, ‘I want to go to That Mysterious Country.’

The whole class wants to go there as well.

But what if she arrives there, and nobody’s waiting?

What if her suitcase full of memories gets lost in the mail?

‘But nothing gets lost there, it’s so organized.’

‘Then I know what will happen.

I will exit the airport, ride a shiny vehicle for hours,

While everyone takes pictures with wide smiles,

And suddenly, boom!

My suitcase full of memories will fall on my head!’

‘Don’t say such nonsense!’

She dreams of visiting That Mysterious Country,

Under the sole condition of having Somebody waiting.

‘Somebody?’

‘Yes, don’t you remember him?

‘The one with the perfect smile and the crooked teeth,

The one with heart-shaped lips and shiny brown hair,

With beautiful long hands to play guitar,

And eyebrows like brush strokes.’

The whole class wants to go there,

But she’s scared.

Not only her suitcase will fall.

Buildings and cherry trees and miniature cars

And poles and computers and ducks and fish

And fried rice and ice cream and lacquer boxes

And microphones and ancient houses and saltwater

Will fall onto her.

‘The world must have become one huge memory,’

A passerby will mutter

As blood escapes the amorphous flattened remains.