When I was seven years old, we move to a city that was mistreated by the 90s, choked by poverty, where fish floated on the surface of the water. The sun and sea breeze smiled, the ruins of the jetties and the rust-corroded ships evoked hopelessness. You walk around, lifted by the smell of flowers and grilled fish, the gang war spreads its wings after the elections.
Seven more years and the graphic novel of my soul slowly starts to smudge through my parents and contemporaries. First the legs: I am dependent on my parents’ resources, from their knowledge of the world, which is why I can’t just go where I want. I am tied to the path they have chosen, which stretches from them to the horizon of life. I had to understand this.
In late summer, after celebrating receiving my school leaving certificate, I am sitting on a bench in the yard while my friends are running around somewhere. The hot and delicate sun tickles me through the branches of the tree in full bloom. The flower beds are palaces. The spiders secretly prepare to spin webs in which poor bumpkins, their steppe victims, become caught.
Suddenly, I become ill in this summer sweetness. I sense how a part of my head is smudged. My thoughts are like the rushing wind that everyone has become accustomed too. I feel nauseous. I take the deepest breath possible and look around. A cat with clumps of fur around its neck eats tripe with mush next to the little house in the entryway to the yard. Sometimes my father drunkenly drives his former best friend in his new car through there. I’m scared that sooner or later he will slam into the hut.
I watch a caterpillar. It crawls like in time lapse and disappears out of our field of vision. Just two weeks later I land at the Law School where the gentlemen of my country divide people into idiots and normies, dolls and sluts, elites and plebs. Their Hitler salute compass is always pointing northward, regardless of their origins (Moldavian from Odessa, Jews from Vinnytsia, Kyiver from Arkhangelsk). When I am stuck in a universe with them, I understand that their legs and heads would not be erased; they all enjoy freedom to speak, to feel, to act, to think, to teach, zoom around in cars and planes, celebrate, rape, wind people up and to steal. In contrast, I am erased on the shoulders, on my body, on my head, on my legs, hardly visible for the world. Every one of my steps contain the risk that I completely blot myself out, disintegrate in the sunlight, as if I’d never existed. The choice between immediately disappearing and slowly, like a caterpillar, a slow disintegration with a chance, so tiny as myself, of not disappearing.
The process takes on momentum. The bright stripes of foreign notions around me turn out to be a tighter cage than I thought. It stabs in my chest, my head throbs, my legs are missing, my arms are gone. At the same time, every breath of fresh air opens up the encrusted wound and the pain pushes me to madness with new strength.
How I wish I were back in a time a few weeks earlier: sitting in a smashed yard, in the warmth beneath the branches. With the street critters, the scent of the flowers, in the sepia of the beams, blinded by the hot and delicate sun that sinks below the horizon. Back to the last moments that my existence knew peace and quiet.
