As I stand here on frozen snow with twenty-below wind chill chapping my cheeks, I’m thinking, “Life is not fucking easy.” Lizaveta is dead. I want her alive. I want her to stand by me and say something. I don’t care what, just something like, “Hey bubblefuck.” That would be enough. “Hey bubblefuck.” But she isn’t. She says nothing. Nothing but silence comes from her grave. She is down there rotting in a little expensive box. I am up here standing on frozen snow. The world has gone on without Lizaveta. We remain above ground working and paying bills, while she remains underground doing nothing.
A week before she killed herself, she wrote me an email. I don’t know why she wrote me an email. She rarely ever communicated her feelings to me. It said:
Dear Vasily,
I’m not sure, people, they want things. Things, things, things, they want them. People, not bad, I don’t know. They are always trying to get what they want, they move toward their goal, if it be great, or small, or just to be lazy. They move to it. They don’t care if you are in their way, they walk over you. They bump into you, making people hate themselves. They hurt my feelings. My feelings Vasily. My feelings are everywhere, scattered, bursting, exploding, deranged, on the floor and up on the roof, my feelings. I can’t find them anymore, they appear under the seat in my car, at red lights, and while eating an ice cream cone. My feelings flowing, popping up and down, and out there in the stores and at the jobs, on sidewalks, they, like scorpions, like stones, cinder blocks, and reptiles, they come and chew at my feelings. We are bursting with emotion, but we pretend we are shells. Everyone that has ever pissed me off, ever rejected me, ever dropped a grenade into the core of my heart feels like I do. I know they do. They are out there right now, feeling, the emotion, the anguish, the fear, the fear, the fear, the fear, the fear, there is so much fear, it is like a fog, a mist, an engulfing smoke that filters into our pores, into our bodies, giving us constipation of Being. My feelings Vasily, I have them, I am your older sister and I have them, you are my younger brother, you have them, we go down, in hell, in the land of snow and pig iron, humidity, and gunshots, the end is nigh, I’m being poetic, but I have to hide my emotions, while sharing them. I have to reveal and not tell, but I want to tell. I want to say like Rimbaud, “I’m suffering, I’m really suffering.” Where is Rimbaud? Dead, underground, one legged. At least he had one great love; I’ve never loved, with passion, with wild nights and thrills. Us, postmodern children cannot love like that. All the cars are broken; the junkyards are full, guarded by men with grease under their fingertips. We are there, like rusty metal, no one is coming, no happiness can be found now. I chose to love nature, to let the sun shine on my face, to look up at tall trees, to be fascinated by the trot of the deer. To be enthralled by the beauty of the human face, not by expensive watches, expensive cars, expensive dresses, haircuts that make me look like a certain movie star. I do not know how to cook. I’m a Russian woman, I’m equal. American women say they are equal, but they bow, they give up their arms and legs and allow chains and servitude to wreck their Being, oh, the night, and the darkness, will it not consume me, take me, my eyes, and my mouth, give me something besides the look of gloom and want of something expensive to show their friends on these faces. Their faces devoid, empty shells, faces that have memorized how to act in certain situations to appear normal, to get through days, to appear like they are people driven by the American Dream, by the Dream to own forever and ever, history has ended and it ends with the word
expensive
I swear these humans, and they are humans, there is something human about all of them, when no one is looking, it comes, but when someone enters their presence, the gestures of a robot return. These humans would wear shit for eyeliner if it was expensive. I cannot bow before this earth, I will not debase myself before these humans who have chosen the adjective
expensive
as a God, they have deified celebrities and ruined their own emotions. They degrade themselves and call it happiness. Oh, Vasily, I am here, still on this earth, amongst humans that have chosen against happiness. I am an insoluble person, Vasily. I cannot mix. You stick me in a crowd of thousands and I make not one friend. Everyone is scared of me because I have emotion, because I am not afraid to admit that I am human, that I shit and fart, and have wet the bed. I go into public, stand and say, ‘I have wet the bed!’ And they run, they run from me like the boogie man. To people the boogie man is truth. Children realize in the middle of the night alone in their beds that their parents do not love them, that the world is unfair, cruel, and that the world, the only world they know is trying to grind them down into unimaginative workers who love the expensive above all else. That is the boogie man, that first fear of anguish, of knowing that you have been condemned to a life that is out of your control. They have freedom, but modern life is structured in such a way that you can only use freedom to choose what soda you drink and what to order at restaurants. But everything else has been chosen for you. Who your parents are, where you are born, how your parents treat you, what school system you go to, what economic class you are from, what neighborhood you grow up in, all chosen for you. And those are the things that make us who we are. We get our reality from the outside, and we don’t get to choose the outside until we’re older, and most of us are destroyed by that outside before we get a chance. Oh, chance, oh emotion, I’m not making sense, but who’s trying to make sense here. People, even if they are trying to make sense, go as far as the cause, and as they approach the reason, the core of the problem, they realize they are part of the reason, and give up, they stop at the cause, because the cause is simple. The reasons terrify them. I decided one day to go to the reasons, to smash all nonsense and grab the reason and pull it down and hold it in my hand, and let it terrify me. And I have been alone ever since. I have been alone for so long, so long without anyone that can understand what I’m trying to explain, trying to get out of this Russian body of mine. But I have received only silence. A silence that screams at me, ‘Just die please, you are ruining my day.’ I cannot take it anymore. I cannot take this anymore, I cannot, I cannot, I cannot, I cannot, this world, these people with their expensive faces have demolished me, have made me falter and now my legs have given out, my Being sways like the willows, and the swamp has engulfed me, there is nothing left to give, I have given and not received, I wanted happiness. I swear, there was a piece of me that woke up every morning and said, ‘I want to be happy today.’ Then they would send their dogs out and they will attack me, bite, scratch, tear at my Being until there was nothing left but to resign myself to this misery. I’m not alone in this suffering, in this bleakness, but what hurts most is that they won’t admit it in unity, they won’t just say to each other that they feel it too, and that is what hurts most, is that I’m alone, but I’m not.