I slept for long hours and then it hit me.
Maybe we romanticized suicide in our teens not as a fleeting moment of madness in the commercial culture, and not entirely out of youthful spite, being frowned upon and not desired anywhere when things mattered in our formative years?
Maybe we did it because we knew what was there for us?
Maybe because we knew that some of us would become the main vehicle for aggressive wars, some of us would become its victims, some -- refugees, some -- unwanted exiles...

Maybe that's why there was such a overwhelming feeling of "let's end it now, while we are young, while we still CAN"?
I would never know the answer because I could not.
I chose to stay.
Bullshit.

Jan 1st 2004
0215
We try to find some champagne in the festive City.
We find it in some kind of 24/7 small shop, buying all they have and eventually drinking it all.
Music is blasting, I remember it as now, t.A.T.u, 200kmh, second edition.

In 2021, there was a tribute album by several artists from all around the world.
Several month later, the war reignited in Ukraine.

The generation that grew up on those lyrics is the main vehicle of waging this war.
It was all lies.
All a giant, flashy lie, that worked as a cover operation for the rise of the Beast from the East.
And I was a part of that lie, I was caught up in it, the best memories in my life are soaked with it like with a deadly poison.

Memories from before the war.
Before the cursed 2014, before I realized that I was shaped by the foreign and aggressive culture, before, when I thought I lived in a sane world when people were more rational than they ever were.

I was young, hungry and angry.
Later I was old, overweight and docile.
Now I am old, overweight but I'm angry again.

It brings damn memories from somewhere from beyond the veil, memories of me sitting behind the desk, building doomed projects, working under people that I later mentored.
Memories of the ultimate freedom when I graduated, of being a cripple, a fragment, but still someone. Trying to cheat the system instead of blending in.
All is gone.
Just I do remain.

Whatever was, it was. It had passed.
I speak different language(s), I work my arse out, I try not to think about whatever background I came from.
It's all gone.
I'm here in a lifeless void instead of what was there.
I could outwardly smile and appear somewhat crazy but positive.

But --
There's a void, people.
Who are you man -- they ask me.

I am The Unnamed and I come from Nowhere.

Fuck it might be an honest answer. I saw so much but yet I didn't see the essential things, I came through a lot but still I didn't go to places I really needed to be.
I did so much but probably it wasn't enough. Maybe those were not the right things at all.
I try to keep calm and carry on.
Dying is a weakness.

More than anything, the Russian culture has The Mission.
That's what makes it attractive.
It is almost always not about Russia, it's about everything else.
It's about Yuri Gagarin to bring the Space to its knees, and to prove that there is no God (as their ideology said then).
It's about the WW2 when Russians saved the day (as they say, ignoring the fact that they were the ones that started it by invading Poland along with Hitler).
It's about bringing the Prols of all lands together.
Russian culture is incredibly outward, unlike any other I know, even the US globalism is facing inwards inside the US.

That's why it's hard to stop thinking in Russian about the outside world.
But I sure will.

Oooh, ok, I understood it now.

I do hate. I just don't hate exact people, not in bulk at least.
I do, though, hate russian culture.

I really hate russian culture for its treachery, even treason.
For all its promises unfulfilled, for all its lies, for all its half-truths, for all that shit.

The real enemy. Making people think that the country has some flair of being somehow good and moral.
Making tethers that still hold me to this country of morons, and although it burns to touch it I couldn't fully break free.
I doubt that I would -- ever.
I never revealed a secret that I, myself, am not fully a product of russian culture.
My native cultures are two.

But still I hate only one of them.

First day of 2023.
2023 is a big mystery to be solved by humanity.

Most of us wished "please let it be at least no worse than 2022"
It might actually be worse. Either that or much better, but I don't think it would be the same.

This year might end the war, or see it escalating, or both.
This year might bring peace, or destruction, or both.
This year might bring white swans, or black ones, or both, perhaps even as part of the same event.

It might be the year of the magnitude of 1918, 1991 and 1945, or it may be as forgotten and insignificant in hindsight (at least in public opinion) as 1922 or 1954, or 1979.

I know one thing this year would not be for sure.
It won't be easy.
For all of us.

But what was in it for me?
2022.

I relearned hate? No.
Oh, I want russia to cease to exist and I want them to experience whatever they've brought to others, but do I hate? No.
Hate clouds judgement. Just cold, merciless rationalism.

What 2023 would be like? I will maybe write a post about it here but mostly I hope for a hard, unforgiving year full of struggle, blood, death... and hope.
The alternative to that is, unfortunately, slavery and death. We are too committed to withdraw, and russians are too dumb to realise what they got themselves into.
Me? I got changes in my life, but nothing matters.

I could not think about myself in this year -- only about the war and it's outcome.
I'm sorry.

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.