MALOSTOVKA (2016)

I came home for a week and stayed for almost two months. 

I feel so safe and good at home, as it’s been nowhere else lately. Only in my childhood. I love this place. Everything is familiar. But everything is gone somewhere. It is not happening again. Not coming back. But it doesn’t have to. Unfortunately I was no longer a part of those people anymore. But everything was familiar here, and the place was sort of telling me: “Look, you’re a stranger, your time is gone”. 

There were  embarrassed feelings, when I came to the local disco, village festival or was just walking around. My peers haven’t visited such places for a long time, they have families now. One of my classmates died of skin tuberculosis. As I was riding a bike with a backpack, wearing slightly holey leggings and shorts, taking photos, people were watching me as though I was an astronaut. I felt that the space was intentionally involving me into this game, tried me, and then finally started helping me. 

Time is being collected into a thrift-box of memories inside all of us. I carefully take out one after another, as if I was processing the film. Like back then, I come to the lake to watch sunset. There is a cemetery next to the lake, where grandma, grandpa and cousin Sergey are buried. I have never met him. He has lived for four days. The sky. The sky is amazing here.

I was remembering a radio interview in the Netherlands. I was 13 or 14. The host asked something about Holland. I said that I liked it a lot there, and that our countries were very alike. He asked, surprised, in what? I replied that we had just as beautiful sky and grass as they did. Everyone was laughing for a long time.

Finally, I got my freedom back. Sometimes the consciousness stops us from being liberated, but it’s different now. I would like to keep this feeling, just as back then, when I was a teenager. The space is something very huge, and the time seems eternal.

It’s us, the people, who are getting old outside and inside. Getting little, round-shouldered, dependent on everything creatures. Suddenly I’m thinking of the time when my mother is gone. And I will have to move forward. I haven’t thought of that before. I’m scared. I’m rewinding the time. I’m going on and everything is repeated. I’m turning pages of memories till the end, but I’ve come only a part of the way. I’m coming back in thoughts to the place where I was born, to the nature, to the land. I feel the freedom again.