I walk past the churches and old houses that are now deserted and abandoned, as the snow is falling down. A poem emerges in my head. “Sobre el asfalto de Madrid llueve nieve…” The lines flow before my eyes, clouding the gloomy landscape of a Thursday morning in the center of the city. I count the metre of these lines as I make and make and make steps.

Se me ha caído encima la madurez,
de golpe, sin darme tiempo
a eludir sus lacerantes aristas.

Madame Autumn burst frantically into my life and hit me hard. She left, but yesterday I found her coat on my windowsill, so I know she will be back soon. She will be back and she won’t forget to bring those words, those raindrops on my shoes, those umbrellas, those eyes I won’t ever forget, those clusters of wounds I have seen, those nights with lying on the floor, those bitten lips, and more, and more, and more. She always knows how to make me howl at the moon in despair because there’s nothing else left to do.

And I will be unarmed and defenceless. I always am.

Te puedes morir
si quieres,
mas no te lo aconsejo.
Sobre cobardes
no hay nada escrito,

- whisper I walking past the riverside. The ice hasn’t started to form yet, so I look at the black waves, close my eyes and see the sea. The sea that, according to another poem, couldn’t sleep, tired of counting the waves, and dreamt about a far place where no one knew about his bitter color. These black waves have already stopped dreaming. Forever.

Sobre el asfalto de Madrid llueve nieve.

And when I say nothing, I mean it. What did I dream last year, what caused all those pathetic words about spring being not a state of nature, but an uncurable condition? Bullshit, complete and utter bullshit. There are no fairies, no daydreams, no sunlight, no lemons and whirpools. Were they at all? I am already not sure.

The only thing that is real, that seems real, that feels real is the silence. Transparent, solid as crystal, inhibiting any sound, word or touch. Crystal cage it is, crystal walls around me. The Lawyer of Glass himself could be envying me for becoming so softly insane being completely sane.

And yet I do not seem to go well with it all anymore. Crystal is solid, it never was as fragile as it looks. So was my voice before. Now I am mute and only able to murmur.

Why do I suddenly start to remember things that took place three months ago? Because only today I’ve developed photos.

The Palace Square.

The Palace Square.

Saint Isaac's Cathedral.

Saint Isaac's Cathedral.

Obligatory tourist photo: view from Saint Isaac's Cathedral.

Obligatory tourist photo: view from Saint Isaac's Cathedral.

Saint Isaac's domes.

Snow.

At Sasha Pushkin's place.

Tsarskoye Selo.

Tsarskoye Selo.

Tsarskoye Selo.

Tsarskoye Selo. Catherine Palace. The ballroom.

Tsarskoye Selo. Catherine Palace. The ballroom window.

Neva.

Neva.

Neva.

And the clouds filled the sky.

Saint Isaac at night.

Our window view. The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood (oh, there's so much poetry in its name!)

The little champagne heaven.

Snowflakes and @totalcensorship.

And in addition:

End of December, Moscow. Ice rain.

End of December, Moscow. Ice rain.

The snow this year – and the last days of the previous one, too – is so white that it blinds. Even the usual greyness of Moscow cannot kill its whiteness. It is not snow perhaps, but a mantle of white marble that has covered the whole city. Marble streets, marble clouds on a marble sky, marble cars with marble passengers, marble people holding marble hands… “And the twelve Gods leapt up in marble fear” – echoes a quote from Wilde’s “Charmides” in my head. Yes, and marble Gods, too.

And this marble shows that everthing is changing and nothing changes at all.

Last year was the year of anachronisms and sighs, smell of old books and bones aching from tenderness. The year of Lorca and Cernuda, the year of Albeniz and Vertinsky. Apart from that, it was the year of debuts: my work at RT, my published poem translations (oh, forgive me, don Luis!) and my reading of them in front of people I admire, my uni studies and, and… Everything.

Maybe I should try to write down a few resolutions to see if I make true at least one of them? No poetry, only prose. No common phrases, only strict aims.

• to finally start publishing articles under my own name.
• to publish an article on paper.
• to publish some translations without any influence or help.
• to start making money somehow.
• to finish that goddamn “Viento en la colina”.
• to learn how to knit and not forget it after 24 hours.
• to learn the whole “Asturias” by Albeniz on guitar.
• to go to Novgorod once again.
• to make my own radio program on FMGU.
• to learn how to play castanets.

All? That’s all. I cannot function without severe borders. And here they are. And while you’re being surprised by my shallowness and prozaicness, I’ll leave you to go and carve these resolutions in marble.

I am – yes, I am! – alive. Yet I don’t know where am I, what year is it not not who am I anymore. I feel like I’ve woken up after a long drinking bout and I am trying to analyze what has happened since I was, speaking in mild words, “absent”. And the whole idea of exploring the reality around me does not seem successfull. I understand the thoughts of Ovid, Catullus and Homer much more than my own ones. I keep talking to Dionysus sometimes, both literally and figuratively. This is not the scariest thing. The fact that it does not feel wrong is.

I close my eyes and hear the roar of waves in a black night, so black that I don’t see the difference between the Universe and the air around me. We’ve lost this feeling in the last 25 centuries.

I open my eyes and see a few comments under my articles on Russia Today’s website. I am read by people on the opposite side of the planet. Did I really open my eyes?

I close my eyes once again and the first thing that comes to my mind is the word “hedonism”. I think I’ve found how to describe the motivation of several episodes of my life.

Something is tearing apart. Something. Slowly, day by day. Yet I cannot catch what it is. Add this to my whole condition of disorientation described in the first paragraph, and voila, you have the full picture. Now the only thing that’s left is to frame it and hang it on the wall with a writing underneath that says “The haze inside, or Someonepunchherintheface” or another similar name of a “modern art” piece.

Maybe the snow will put everything in its place. Last years the snow was the salvation I needed.

And thus they buried Hector, tamer of horses.

I’m unconsciously stepping on the same rake, again and again and again.

But where was the summer? And was it real? Wasn’t it a dream? Memories seem quite surreal. Time gaps and random pieces. A few school-leaving exams. A nightingale insolently singing during Russian. A website with results. An evening at my granny’s house with sedatives, alcohol and knitting. Running between universities with a ton of useless papers. My godfather and his illness. New exams. Studying literature in public transport. The feeling of unity with those who carry the same textbooks and go in the same direction as you with the same problems and worries as you. Interview at MSU. The play I wrote about it. Random trip to Petersburg. Ladoga. An old painter in metro. Bare feet on Nevsky. Calls and lists. Confirmation. Mademoiselle Irina. Middle of nowhere. Swallows, the wonderful creatures. Broken iPhone. Jupiter. Douglas the dog. …and here the autumn starts.

Nothing else, only snapshots and bright flashes. No words, they stopped to mean anything in spring.

And sun, eternal sun. Omnipresent sun. Almighty Sun. I bend my knees, your Majesty.

In certain moments I felt like I was running away from myself. But what worked pretty good before didn’t become the way out today. Even dawns and swallows – my heart clenches when I see their tails chaotically flying above – didn’t help. Neither helped Jupiter, he’s too naughty and egocentric sometimes.

No, this can’t go on like this, you’d say. Yes it can. Yes, it can.

It’s called autumn hell, in case you forgot, my dear girl.

Capturing the moment of self-love – and I can’t lose this! – was quite a hard task due to the impossibility of using Zenit and the absence of a normal camera.

Warning: crappy digital photos with tons of stupid Lightroom tricks. I’m so mainstream.

Here we go.

Self-love in black and white.

Self-love in color.

Self-love and messy hair.

Self-love is so strong that I don't even want to 'shop my skin problems.

Self-love and ginger hair.

The life of a university entrant is hard, harder than you can imagine. Queues, queues, queues and queues. And yes, queues. And mackle-paper. And queues. In a week or so my destiny will be uncovered and… well, let’s talk when it happens. I still have to pass through tomorrow’s branch office of Sodom and Gomorrah, I mean, an interview at MSU Journalism dept., and a few more exams. But we’ll see then. This is not the scariest thing, in the end. Worse things are the other ones that happen.

“And once again the wind is on the hill”, people said.

It is a chaos, and I don’t know, what’s stronger: its piercing bitterness or its pleasant sweetness. Here I am, in a sea of lemons instead of oranges, spending nights talking to Pierrot – sometimes I even think I am his sister – and the moon. We are all stuck here. And where is the path outside, I don’t know. These bodies, words and breathes won’t let me escape, they won’t. Chains? No. Not puppet strings either. My own thoughts cut sharper.

…and after collecting all the pieces of broken glass, they lit a candle in front of a sacred image and started to pray, softly breathing out: “Make the wind go back to the hill, please”.

Did you want it? Here you got. And be careful with your wishes next time, silly girl. Your midsummer night’s dream is going way too deep, and will sink even deeper. Cure? …There isn’t a need in one. Anyway, who told you that oranges are better than lemons?

Procession moves on, the shouting is over,
Praise to the glory of loved ones now gone.
Talking aloud as they sit round their tables,
Scattering flowers washed down by the rain.
Stood by the gate at the foot of the garden,
Watching them pass like clouds in the sky,
Try to cry out in the heat of the moment,
Possessed by a fury that burns from inside.

Cry like a child, though these years make me older,
With children my time is so wastefully spent,
A burden to keep, though their inner communion,
Accept like a curse an unlucky deal.
Played by the gate at the foot of the garden,
My view stretches out from the fence to the wall,
No words could explain, no actions determine,
Just watching the trees and the leaves as they fall.

The Eternal.
1980.

Welcome and make yourself comfortable: no one will get out of here chaste. All of you will pass through it, some will drown immediately, some will get drawn in slowly, making the shipwreck pleasantly longer for us, the audience. Well, some of you will get off with only a few grains of sand on your jacket, but it’s more of an exception, and, as we know, there are more rules than exceptions.

Your humble compère ended up being a luckless sailor on this dry land, too. Can you see those dark clots of sandy soil under my fingernails? I can’t get rid of them for hundreds of nights already, and when I’m  starting to hope that I’ll get up in the morning with clean hands, when I’m starting to believe that all has passed… (covers his face with hands) And after a strange-looking girl holding a pair of carnations – unusual ones, I can be mistaken, but I swear they looked green – made me pass through it once again, I’ve lost all my hopes to stop hiding my hands in pockets every time I leave home.

That’s why I have nothing more to do than to stand here, in front of you, ladies and gentlemen, and look as you all drown. Inch by inch. Maybe one day I’ll recognize a familiar face between you, but I won’t even give you a hint. Maybe one day you will be the ones to drown me once again. But it will be one day. And now…
(makes an inviting gesture)
Please!
But do not forget that you already have no choice.