I want to pick up a sewing needle and thread it with a read thread and puncture my fingertips with it and embroider right through them. I want the needle to cause me pain and the forming droplets of blood to express the emotions I refuse to put in words. I want the stitches that I leave to be the productive forward that I lack in my life. I want the act to be recognized as self-harm and then left to be. I want to be validated and yet allowed to wallow in my anguish until I figure out what it is that I’m going to do. I want to see my mouth shut and only speak through the symbols on paper. And yet I want to truly believe the things that I write. I want my writing to manifest as feelings and life and imbue me with love and drive and desire that I can imagine, but not experience. I want the shame of uselessness to seal my throat shut and become invisible and helpful in my own house - but I want that to last only a moment, so that I could scream my frustration freely again as soon as I don’t feel negligible. I want things to happen. I want to be the one happening. Am I still alive? Do I deserve to be?

I’ve been wondering how to translate all the little sparks of physical intimacy to the anemic immateriality of the virtual plane, how to give shape to emotions and desires using nothing nothing but words and the desperately creative power of our mirror neurons. How do you vocalize a touch? How do you write down the shy blooming of a smile?

You know what I would like to do to you? I would like to fill a bath with warm, scented, soapy water and have us gingerly step into the bubbles. I’d sit there, right opposite of you, and pour cascades of warm water on your shoulders and lather your arms with soap and put handfuls of foam on your head and laugh like a kid and kiss the tip of your nose. And you’d be all flustered, but happy and relaxed, shivering with pleasure from the changes of temperature as the warm water caressed your back. And I’d crack open a box of candied violets - this delicacy that can’t ever be found in Texas - on the bath shelf, and lean over the side to eat them, all the while talking about some obscure TV shows and literary critiques - and you’d just sit there, leaning back, content, marveling at this new normal; feeling the stress of your family and your past melt into the distance.

It’d taste like a candied violet does - powdery and childlike and festive and elevated and... inaccessible.

My mother is a classical musician. She once used to play herself, and is now a professor of chamber music at the National Academy of Arts in Kiev. When I was little – no more than four or five years of age – I would lay supine on our living room’s floor next to the piano while she practiced and listen. In case you have never heard a musician practice in the solitude of their home – they never play the whole piece through. Instead, one phrase is repeated over and over with minute variation, until eventually you stop listening for continuity or melody and lose yourself in the chords, in the harmony, in the rocking back-and-forth of sounds, like waves upon a sea. When in doubt, my mom would glance at me, sprawled on the floor, and enlist my help:

“What picture do you see when I play this passage?”

“Ghosts. They are exiting a cave onto a little clearing, and they are dancing in a circle, holding hands. There is one single tree and many rocks. The tree is blooming.”

“If you could paint it, what colors would you choose?”

“Grey. And pink. And light green.”

“Would you use watercolors, or pastels, or pencils, or markers?”

“Watercolors, Momma.”

She would look pensive for a moment, lean into her keyboard, make a note in her sheets, and proceed to play another interpretation – the chords hopping around some more.

That was my practice. I had spent my childhood lying flat on the floor in a state that was half trance, half prostration, dreaming up worlds as colorful and ephemeral as the tunes themselves. Soon, I couldn’t perceive music as anything but visual, and going into an abstract daze didn’t strike me as something unnatural. Life was sometimes a little too fast for me; I didn’t like loud noises; I didn’t like crowds; I didn’t like certain textures and colors; I didn’t like the slippery, pearly taste of semolina porridge I was force-fed every morning; I did like memorizing very long poems by heart. To stay sane, I had to access my trance-like state regularly. It would come about spontaneously, my eyes would glaze over, my body would go a little stiff - and everyone around just learned to let me have my moments.

As a teenager, I learned to induce the state deliberately. I would wait for a student ensemble to stop by our apartment for a lesson; as they entered the living room and my mom closed the door behind them, I would go to the adjoining bedroom down the hall. I would turn off the light, and tie a black velvet band around my eyes, and lie down on a waterbed under a pile of weightless down blankets, and wait for the music to begin. (As I got older, the ritual came to involve actions of a more sexual nature to supplement the basic sensory deprivation). And as the sounds came rushing in, I would concentrate on the timbre, the harmonies, the acoustics, the unexpected dissonances and resolutions – the repetition. The descent into my mind was gradual. There were alternating feelings of being very small and very large. An image of a pin point. An image of a giant rubber ball. Craggy, sulfurous, yellow rocks being washed over by salty ocean water. Whirlpools. My mouth going dry. My eyeballs sinkingin the sockets. My back, my shoulders, my legs going cold – floating. Birds. Passing through the eye of a needle. Squeezing through a very tight space. And then… I was in.

I used to call it “My Other World.” There were visions. Once, it was a giant slab of marble floating on the waves like a hollow bead, somewhere in the middle of a great vastness of the ocean. Atop the rock sat a haggard man, desiccated by the scorching sun. There was no purpose for him being there; there was no destination in mind; he was surely going to die there – and I watched the rock drift aimlessly towards the horizon, the man gazing at me the whole time, utterly lost and helpless. Another time, it was a night somewhere in the Himalayas. The air was crisp with cold, and the stars were bright and sharp and distant, and the darkness was stupefying. I stood by a tiny wooden hut covered with feet of snow, a thin trickle of smoke rising above it. It was the cornermost hut of a village, the last frontier – and beyond it lay a vast nothingness of pure white snow, stretching forever, eternally, to the beginning of time. The stars would start ringing in the metallic unity of octaves and suddenly, at the meeting point of sky and snow, I would spy a figure slouching towards me. The figure would have red eyes.

Sometimes I got to stroll through medieval towns. Sometimes I got to meet people. Sometimes those people spoke. Sometimes their words came true in real life. Sometimes, that was just my memory playing a trick on me.

Did I know back then that what I was doing fell under the umbrella of psychonautics? Did I know that I was taking intentional trips vivid enough to rival a psychedelic experience? No – and I never thought about this until we got to read Lovecraft’s descriptions of the city of R’lyeh in class; until l got to read Huxley and Leary a bit later; and until one of the students asked about the potential ways of inducing a trip. I don’t think I’ve ever gone anywhere beyond the states described at levels 2 and 3 by Leary, but I did experience the state of “oneness” described by Huxley, the “istigkeit” of things, the… well, the harmony. The chords. The sense of everything being in tune with each other, and having its own deserved place.

Cadence. Return to a tonic. Lift your hands. Wake up.

You leapt into my ocean,

Boasting that you can swim. 

When you drowned, you

Blamed me for it. 

Then you found your safe harbor. 

You plunged headfirst into the water,

Only to break your nose

One foot down.

The moral of the story is: stop doing nosedives, or learn how to swim, you silly goose you. 

You know, I want to rant for a bit. Everyone uses Facebook to rant about random stuff once in a while, right? So, here’s my rant. I feel anxious. I feel anxious all the time. Mostly, because I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. You know, just like everyone else, I have this wish, this urge to do the right thing in life. Believe in the right thing; pursue the right thing; be a good person; love the right person; treat others the right way. Know that my life has the right kind of point. And if there is no such thing as the right thing, and if life has no point, I want to be certain of that. I want to settle that matter once and for all in my heart and move on with my life with that in mind. I want that certainty. I want to know that I’m not wasting time. Even if I am wasting time, I want to believe, deep down, that one day I will arrive at that certainty and things will clear themselves up. Like, y’know, in the “you just have to wait and see, kid” kind of way.

I want to know I’m treating other people well. I want to know that I am not the Wicked Witch of the East, who causes people pain out of carelessness, or greed, or plain evil. I want to know that within me doesn’t lie a dormant Hitler, who is only restrained from emerging by my fear and cowardliness. I want other people to tell that I have a good heart. I want people to remember, 10 years after meeting me, that something about me made them happy. I want to know I’m not an abuser. I want to know that I haven’t accidentally become a monster.

But that certainty is nowhere to be found. From day to day, I’m rushing about between different ways to capture meaning.

I read the Bible every day, but, trying to cover all my bases, I also read nuclear physics and organic chemistry. I take drugs that calm down the hormones in my brain, but I also try to experience the most feeling that this world has to offer. I toil away at a double major in a far away foreign country, to be successful and not forget to pursue my dream, but I tell other people that their grades don’t define them. I bake people cakes out of the blue to practice selflessness, but immediately tell myself the sacrifice wasn’t worth it and you can’t buy the love of others, let alone care about it. I try to forgive those who make me hurt, but heed the women’s magazines’ call to maintain healthy boundaries. I alternate between “you are good enough” and “you should always improve as a person.” I fluctuate between “nothing really matters, since we’re all doomed” and “your deeds go on the two sides of the scale, and each and every one counts.”

I want to have faith in something. I want to have a capacity for faith. I want to have a capacity for trust. I want to believe that good outcomes exist; that people love me; that there is a person, or a place, or a thing that will stay, that will not quit on me whatever happens. I want to believe in it with all my heart the next time I wake up at night screaming, the next time I bawl my eyes out crying.

I want to know that I am not trapped inside my head, floating in a whirlwind of insanity, and that things outside have meaning, and purpose.

I want to know I’m doing the right thing. Like on the dreaded math test in middle school, with time tick-tocking on the clock, I just want to know that I am doing the right thing.

"Is it different back there?"

We're outside a small Californian cafe, drinking our boba teas, lounging in the sunshine. "Is it different from the US?" they ask. I smile. "A little." "Is it cold?" There is a roll of carefree laughter among us. 

Yes, it is cold. And I am back in a frigid February, trotting behind a broad back of a bold surgeon down the sickly yellow corridor of an unheated hospital. I'm bringing syringes and ampules to my grandmother, because the department has run out of those, and the way to the resuscitation room lies through the children's cancer ward. They are screaming their heads off. I remember the children screaming their heads off, because our government forbids narcotics, and the ones allowed cost too much, and the only one available is morphine, and morphine doesn't help for SHIT,  and the nurses just stand around helplessly, unable to cease the children's pain. And the children are screaming. The ampoules in my plastic bag contain fentanyl that my family smuggled from Czech Republic illegally. I am 16. 

I don't know how to convey it. So I stay silent. 

"Yeah. Yeah, it is cold. Gets to -4F in winter." I take a sip. -4. -5. People had slept out at -6 once. Snow. I remember a column of fire in a whirlwind of snow.  The protesters were burning tires to keep off the armed riot police. There was so much soot in the air the curtains in my apartment turned black. My grandma had metastases in her lungs, and she would cough up phlegm. In the protestor's encampment, there was an inner circle of thrown-together barricades, and, several feet outward - a circle of police block posts. We lived within the inner circle. Every morning I took the  subway to school, and wondered if the stations would be open in the afternoon so that I could get back home. I carried my passport in my pocket every day to show at the block post as proof of residency (they tried to keep the protestors from flowing in). I got this habit of having all my documents on me at all times ever since. I have them right here in this brown leather binder in my right pocket. Just in case I ever need to stand up and move at once. Again. 

That's another habit I find a bit difficult to justify to my local friends. 

You know, we joke a lot about my culture. I have once tried to explain what buckwheat is to them. "Shake your buckwheat! Lemme grab your buckwheat!" I laugh, as they slap the fat packets of brown grain. In reality, buckwheat is the cheapest crop you can buy in Ukraine. That's why we eat it so often. My grandma could cook practically anything out of buckwheat. Buckwheat with chicken, buckwheat with beef... And when we couldn't afford meat anymore - buckwheat with milk. Buckwheat with butter. Buckwheat with dried raisins. Buckwheat with buckwheat! Buckwheat with buckwheat for two days in a row. Buckwheat with buckwheat for three days in a row... "Sweetie, will they serve you lunch at school?"

I remember my grandmother's voice sinking with guilt, as if she was guilty of anything.It is considered a great shame for a Ukrainian lady to admit she has no meal prepared. 

And Ukrainian ladies are gorgeous. Gorgeous and generous. "Do you have the same issues with sexism as we do in the US?"  Heh. 

I remember one girl, my middle-school classmate. She had flowing jet-black hair, and velvety skin, and supple breasts too large for a 14 year old, and playful dimples that made me more uncomfortable than her cleavage. She spoke with a lilt in her voice. We were BFF, but every night I wrote stanzas that rhymed with her name. She came over to watch a movie once, wearing a mini-skirt and a tank top (in February!), and in the darkness my eyes kept tracing the outlines of her back and thighs. I gave her my entire library - my Hemingway, my Bradbury, my Richard Bach. She painted my portrait with oil. We ate ice cream together daily, and one day she sneaked into my shower stall and we kissed. Then one night she called, her voice was blubbering. Shakily, she started from afar - that she went to a house party, but she was the only girl, but she stayed anyways, and the guys made her drink, and they made her drink more, and there were many of them, and they... 

They found out about us, as much as we tried to stay disguised. And they decided to avenge the "misuse" of her female parts by stuffing eight male ones into her. I lose my flair for fancy language as I speak about it. There is no fancy language for it. 

The sun is blazing. Leaning back, I take a look at my friends' smiling, innocent faces, their neon dyed hair, their ice filled drinks; at my flannel thrown across one of their bike frames; at an ad playing in the window behind. I squint and take another sip. "It is a little different," I say. "It is a little different."

Clocks on the wall are ticking away

minutes, days, weeks of the silent emptiness you've left behind.

The hole you left in my chest filling,

spilling with sighs,

                        stirring.

Uneasy, I walk the streets wordlessly,

Keeping my eyes to the ground, 

Gulping the bitterness of betrayal -

I fear the strangers around me; 

they don't deserve

The stare of my eye. What

if their warmth just a lie?

                                    like yours...

I pray. I pray every night for the peace of your mind,

For the happiness you might find. And you do, 

In your play, your games - the old shoe. 

You're fine.

I banish you from my thoughts,

Surrounding myself with sterile silence,

But despite all the pain you caused,

and the fear you brought, and

the nightmares that haunt the back of my eyelids 

I still miss you. 

Oh you. 

So, I had a conversation with this 6-year-old girl on the NY subway. She asked me what was drawn on my bag, and what was in it, and who I was. And I told her that I am a student, and study biology, but I also want to write books for little kids; and how important it is to have a wish and work hard to try to make it come true, and had a laugh about it. Then she asked me if I would be happy if my wish came true, and I said, "Yes." And she asked if my parents would be happy for me if my wish came true, and I said, "I hope so." She thought for a moment, and replied, "A wish coming true is not that cool if there's noone to be happy for you." At that I lost my capacity of speech.

And I love you. I love you more than the sun and the moon. I love you more than cream and blueberries and gingerbread on a Sunday breakfast. I love you more than presents on the Christmas morning. More than a quiet sunset behind the roofs of Brezi. I love you more than the sea, and more than music. I love you more than life itself, and if I could fly up to the sky and float around, twirling and diving and backflipping and seeing all the birds above and all the cities below me, that would not match the excitement of seeing you. Because I love you.

And when I’m angry, I love you. And when I’m jealous, I love you. And when I’m far away doing tons and tons of other things, I still love you. And even when bitterness talks in me and I say I never want to see you again and I don’t like you, I still love you. And when a person loves somebody, they cannot be completely bitter. The bitterness retreats before it. And then I try to love you more. And when I think it must be impossible to love more, I realize that

you probably love me twice as much.

That makes me feel like a slacker. But a very warm, and cozy, and content slacker :) Because, I mean, being loved TWICE as much as blueberries and cream for breakfast? That’s something.