A certain nasheed is playing on repeat in my headphones.
An echo of the old life, old world, old habits.

I'll tell you a story of someone.
***
In her online life, she is from Saint-Petersburg. She is a proud SPBGU alumnus and she now lives elsewhere. Her friends are predominantly russian, she lives by Moscow time, she even worked for a russian company part-time once. She is Grammar Nazi, racist and prejudiced, like most literate russians are. She has a lot of friends who are sure that they saw her around Saint-P while she was still there.

Only a handful of people on the planet know that she spent most of her time in Ukraine and only visited russia twice in her life for a brief look around.

Last days of The Cursed Year.
I cannot say much.
I want to cry aloud, fuck it. I'm so triggered by the smallest of things.
And yet I try to move forward with my life.

I have better situation than most of the country, with the salary more than twice the average (it's a big deal here), and yet I feel lost, unfulfilled and desperate.
I want to be better in a lot of things, but do I?
Who am I?

I ask questions to anyone who asks me questions.
I want them to see, I want them to understand for themselves, I WANT THEM TO UNDERSTAND THE WHOLE SHIT AROUND THEM.
I succeed. And yet, I fail.

This is not about summing up the year.
Not even about c**d (though my thoughts are with you)
It's just about me.

Summing it up again
I don't want to recall 2022.
After Feb 24 I was in a reactive mode again.
Listening to the last Oxxymiron.
Going back to the City in Jan, hearing news about Kazakhstan, flying back.
Staying with family, catching something that kept me in bed for a week and then some.
Day after day of understanding that the war would begin, and would begin inevitably.

Last months, last days before everything changed.
I was out of my deep sleep and forced to think, to act.
Now I have a job I have to actually struggle with, I have people that I need to interact with and I have that awful feeling of failure and that most people would've paid handsomely to be me.
Poor wretches.

Poor me.
Shit.

22nd of December.
What was 2022 for me?
The Shitty Year?
I could not pick a name shitty enough.

On 24th of February, it all ended abruptly. I try not to think what's next, I only know that it would take at least several years for the survivors to return to more or less normal life in Ukraine -- and things would not, while this generation lives, return to normal in russia again. My darkest prediction about the russian culture and politics were eclipsed by this collective suicide.

I don't really think about space anymore, because we didn't really make it as a race, maybe if we survive this Cold War, we might stand a chance again.

I could only try to balance between escape and action.
Dammit.

Oh.
It's time to begin to reflect on this year's summary.
Well
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
What can I say more?
2014 was The Cursed Year, true, but what to call 2022?

For me?
The Year That Had Undone My Escape?

For others?
The Year That Had Ruined Lives And Shit?

In December 2021/January 2022 I hoped that the war would not start.
Now I hope that it would end by the Ukrainian victory in 6-9 months and after a quarter-million more deaths, and it's the "most positive scenario" hope that I can reasonably expect myself to entertain.

And personally, this year I stopped living my lazy retired life and I dived into the people and their crap. Splendid.

Nothing would ever be the same.
Again.

I'm not one of you.
Since young age it troubled me, it burned me from the inside

Even when I didn't understand who you truly were.
As I said, I was weird from the onset.
"I wish I were one of you" -- I wrote when I was 12.
"I'm not one of you" -- I wrote when I was 18.

I am dull.
I am dumb.
I am fat and I am old.
I could've been good at your game, truly.
But the great Random decided otherwise.

I thought I would be able to forget, to escape, to scratch it, scratch it like an ash mark from my hand after cleaning my fireplace.
But I keep coming back to 2 things in my life to -- the one that used to be called by The Name and to this.
And my fate is to have my quiet evenings marred by insanity.

What should've been destroyed, was destroyed.
It took all of my coveted dreams with it, all of it.
The life I had, the country I lived in, the vibes, the ties, the faiths, the hates, the rights and the wrongs.
It was all destroyed because it had to be.

And now only the cold, unmoving judgement remains.
15 years ago feels like an eternity, it felt like that even before the war of the 24th.
And I peer into the past, cold and unmoved.

It's so simple to blame Russia for all the wrong things in my life.
But sometimes, simple things are right to do.
Sure, some of them, I did myself. Some of them were caused by other sinister things.
But Russia bears lots of the blame.
It would not be forgotten.

We were.
Quiet conversations in the crowded corridors, in the derelict concrete of bad neighborhoods, in the foldable chair, seeing the grapes grow... The feeling of each other's presence there somewhere.

How would you describe it, the feeling of overwhelming potential, of YOU CAN.
The normal, human might and power.
Not that shit that came after.

People are curious why I don't care about what I say to higher-ups.
Dafuq, I was on the top of the world, on top of my little personal world -- and I failed.
After this I don't care about most things anymore.

depression is my profession.
all i need is money, loneliness and stability.
i want to live my life separately.

but

i have problems with money, loneliness and stability.

i want to cry all day long.

THE END

AFI playing in my headphones.
I'm strolling the City -- cold, emotionless, hostile.

I am beyond care at that point.
I've made my mind, and everything else is so simple.
I stopped caring about dying, about living, about fulfilling anyone's hopes.
About all but anything.

Numbing, empty feeling envelops me in full, and long dead poet's words echo in this silence, overarching the lyrics.
Death is worth living for.
But love is not worth waiting for.

I'm pretty sure that it wasn't what he meant, wasn't even what he wrote.
But I hardly care, it's how I read it, it's how those words resonate in me, the only filler for that place where my soul was so recently that I can still feel its dying echo.

Ups and downs

-- Once a great secret was revealed, it cannot be unknown.
-- But it can.
That's my take from today.

I woke up, it was 0401at the screen.

Fear.
Fear and focus, so familiar that I can sense the blood in my feet flowing slower to reroute more oxygen to the head.

Someone is out there. Something.
I almost remembered what it could be..
I froze in my bed, trying to hear it coming.

I was not able to sleep, almost as if I knew that it was dangerous to sleep.
Suddenly it came to me.
I remembered why I thought that all other problems were so small and insignificant.
It was all true.
It was all true.

Or was it?
Things once revealed to one can become unknown by him again.
They really can.

Rotten Federation.

People overcomplicate their shit.
It is all VERY easy and simple in the beginning.
Then the flavors of simple intermingle, reflect and mash with each other, breeding complexity.
Only then.
If you tug on something complex, you will get to the simple.
But people, gosh, those people...

They think in complex categories without understanding the simplicity behind them, and therefore they are gullible, overcomplicated, not making any sense and generally a lot more wrong than if they would just try to see through their primitive views.
Yes, primitive.

You're primitive if you are thinking in complex categories, and only in them.
If you can see what's behind them - you're not.
Relatively, of course.

The reality I had in my dreams was post-conflict.
Post my own little thing I had essentially got alive from.

Sitting in the foldable chair outside, shivering because of thoughts and memories.
Walking on an island no one can get through to me. Alone, with a few acquaintances at the best.
Forgotten, effectively dead for the world outside.
Not this.

Not again, not being there for some people and fussing over my inability to be there for some other people, not endless self-doubt and questions that start with "Maybe I would've been more useful if"

Interesting times we live in are bringing shit I never thought I will have to do.
I wish I had the strength to do more.
But I apparently don't.

I turned away.
I could not watch.
It's a torture, they are like us, we were like they and yet --
Tragedy.

Cutting through my heart even as I try not to watch.
I better overcompensate the next thing I didn't have for the 100th time than this.
No.
There is a reason why I don't usually watch movies.
When there's a relief and association on something pleasant in most people, in me it's a reminder that somewhere inside me there's a carefully hidden black hole that once sucked me in almost completely.

I would better be alone somewhere between nowhere and nowhere on my green rock of an island.
I would better be playing weird games or trying to find someone missing on a friend's request.
Not this.

It was a very convoluted part of my life.
I'm starting to think it wasn't too bad after all.
I always start to think so about shit when some time passes, usually years. Sometimes decades.

Not too bad -- going home after work, strolling the frozen big city streets.
Not too bad -- nightly gaming sessions alone, just to forget the sounds outside and the life outside.
Not too bad -- smoking pipe at the office balcony downtown, joking with friends about all shit.

There was a very sinister backdrop of this, our time was literally running out.
But here I am, trying to break free but never being free.

I valued freedom more than anything.
My own one, and one of others.
Others forsake it.
So be it.

I died.
I died all those years ago
But I didn't

Things just happened over my dead body which, purely by coincidence, was alive.
"Are you a native English speaker"?
Fuck man, I learned your language after I died. I didn't even live knowing it.
Or did I?

Nothing is better than than the feeling you would never have again.

I am just trying to be honest, as if it could help.
The train is gone, and the damage was done.

There is nothing they can fix.
There is nothing I can fix.
I doubt that there's real me somewhere sometimes.

It's something permanent. Something that is here FOREVER.
I've made grave mistakes by not acknowledging it in my life.
I'm breathing out smoke I didn't inhale.
I've lost.

I wake up.
I speak The Name.
c***d.
I wake up again.
The awakening.

it is not great, to relive everything that was happening.
Bang -- and you're at the mountain P.
Bang -- and it's a cold morning, you need to get up and drag yourself to a 9am meeting, and a parcel with your new wallet had just arrived.

I always regarded wallets as a sign of dull stupidity of a boring and grown up person.
Now I am that person.
A fat, boring, grown up slime of a man.

One friend of mine was whining today that she cannot hold any further in this life -- and I thought that it was exactly how I feel about all the shit sometimes.
But I wake up.
I speak The Name.
c***d.
And I wake up again.
And again
And again
And

Explicit is better than implicit
Simple is better than complex
Complex is better than complicated
Flat is better than nested
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules
Errors should never pass silently
Now is better than never

Ghosting, also known as simmering or icing, is a colloquial term which describes the practice of ending all communication and contact with another person without any apparent warning or justification and subsequently ignoring any attempts to reach out or communication made by said person.

Do I want to return?
Hell yes.
Even after all those years.

Do I picture it, do I dream about it?
No.

I could not imagine it anymore.
I will persevere until the end, trying to make better choices and eventually failing.
I will not end here today.

I don't want to burn anymore.
I don't want to die anymore, and for a long time.
I want to be left in peace, meditating alone.
Do I?

There are too many of us inside me.
I even don't want my life to serve a purpose.
I am going with the flow, and I want it to carry me.

Long gone are the days where I asked if I could change the flow by making calculated moves.
I can't.

Death before d^W
No.
The purpose was lost

I was weird from the start, from the onset.
This weirdness could be sensed here.
Yes, I was weird, and I harbored heretic thoughts bordering on insanity but I had the PURPOSE

And then I was lost.

And they, they stood around and they cared only about my abstract well-being.
They even wanted me to be GOOD, not understanding that I'm now NOTHING.
They even THOUGHT that I was GOOD, not understanding that I was indeed no more.

My loved ones rarely cared about ME.
In no small part because I was very secretive about myself but why was I?
Because their care was flame and sword. They tried to destroy ME and build a new one every time they SENSED.
Bullshit.

All I stood for and all I believed in, it's destroyed or being destroyed, or is in danger to be destroyed, in no small part by myself
In 2010, I betrayed myself and some other people, I grew soft and I was manipulated.
In 2010, I did the best choice of my life and I was able to be THE best version of myself because of it.
Which one is true?
Probably I will die without knowing it.

Now -- I stare at everything I could have been from the depths of who I had become and I wonder -- does it even exist, what I'm staring at?
Is it a point in the field of probabilities? Was it ever a point there, even?

Did I make the right choices?
DID I?
The answering silence is more profound that it ever had been.

Voices of Peace - Криокамеры