I’ve left this world and am now in a new world of New York, and am actually taking a break from that world now to visit my mom in Georgia. In the center of the Bulgaria-Georgia-New York Venn diagram, there’s me. Maybe others but we haven’t met yet.
From a time when I was still enmeshed in that world, barely seeing past the end of my nose:
I feel such an alienation from my family which I forget about sometimes when I am here in Bulgaria world and apartment world. Apartment world is where I get stuck. I'm here now. No one knows anything about what I'm doing but I don't do very much. Here are two things in the room with me:
1. The rug on my floor is gold and black with a pattern of six flowers in a circle around a seventh flower. I just wrote this and I wasn't connected to the wifi which I steal every day; I lost everything. It wasn't a big loss. I am feeling demoralized though. I haven't done this in awhile.
The rug on my floor is gold and black with a pattern of five flowers circled around another flower and I found out when I returned from the United States in September that the rug is reversible. Before it was black on gold. Now it is gold on black. I think that while I was gone, my landlady brought my rug out to the balcony, shook it out, brought it inside, and set it down upside-down. My world hinges on the gold and black, black and gold. It collects my stray hairs. I can't pick all of them off. After I let things deteriorate for a long time, after a few months and a really busy spell, I come through and take a look at it and each hair and fuzz adds to my weight of, I'm not doing enough. I pick a few hairs off individually and I never take the rug out to my balcony and beat with a broom like a really thorough person would do, such as my upstairs neighbor. The rugs they hang over the sides of their balconies and beat with brooms cast shadows on my rug. When I explain to people who have never seen my place what it's like, I say, it's so much nicer than what I could afford in some American city. I could never buy such pretty rugs, for example. There are nice rugs everywhere. Really, I have never lived in a place with pretty rugs everywhere. Every room has its rug. But I see the rug in my room the most. It's burned black and gold holes into my eyes. Black and gold, no one can see me now. I can do exactly what I want. I don't do anything. I put my blue yoga mat down a lot of times and move around there in the middle of the rug. I come up too quickly and hit my head on the light fixture. I leave the radiator on for too long because I indulge myself, alone. I can't do anything laying down on the rug because the floor below it is hardwood and it hurts the bones in the my hips. At one point, after I had lost my family ring from Latvia and when I still thought that I might find it again, I checked under the rug. The rug rings in every season. In the winter, it never sees sun. In the spring, there is sun in patches. In the summer, because my bedroom faces east, I can open the curtains every morning and stand in whole pools of sun.
2. The picture on my mirror shows me in head on desk position or public nap position at the cathedral in Budapest. I forget the name of the saint they named the cathedral after. Drew and I were there together. He took the picture. He brought the disposable camera with him from the United States. He met me there and I picked him up from the airport looking so peaked and even half-sick I think. This was when he was sick all the time. We often talk now about he should have saved his big gesture of spending money and flying out; we jumped the gun. How could we have known? My head is cradled in my arms, my arms are propped up on the cathedral wall, we are on the roof so we are eye-level with a tower, spires and the city laid out beyond. The sun is hitting me just like that. I guess that was the point of laying my head down, it was to say can you believe the sun, I could nap in it. Can you believe this rooftop? Look. My arm is covering my mouth but I'm smiling. I'm the cat that caught the canary. Drew points the camera at me.
I tried to think of a third thing, to follow the magic rule of three, but I couldn't!
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
yousharknotpass
titsay
tankhall
pixelskylines
dailybridgerton
