The New Place

So I moved into a new place; packed my backs, rolled out of Tanya’s family and into a place in the old side of Vasilevsky Island. Ten minute walk from school, which will save me an hour a day. I figure I’ll spend it learning to cook.

Already I feel like a newer man. Life in the family was weighing on me. They were decent people, but no matter what I did they depressed me. Everything and everybody in that apartment was stagnant, and I felt I couldn’t escape the slow rot as long as I was there. I spent so much of the last three weeks being irritated at the food I had to eat, the endless arguments about the same old shit (Tanya yelling at Serioga for acting like a normal fifteen-year-old), the interminable sucking sound of the television, and the cigarette smoke that was killing my host-father.

There was nothing self-conscious about his smoking; he did it like a true addict, which is to say as unglamorously as a diabetic injects insulin. Cigarettes had become fully integrated parts of his daily cycle, his entire body had grown around the habit like a tree around an old wound. There was a crevice in his fleshy right hand––the one whose thumb he’d shot-off in the army––contoured to the cigarette. When he brought it up to his lips he inhaled gently, and when he brought it down the suction made a soft puckering sound, like a mother’s kiss.

I’d walk into the kitchen at three in the morning and he’d be there, smoking. He had these beautiful light blue eyes, always moist around the edges. To see him there, night after night, burning away his only free time on movies he’d already watched made me want to scream. He once told me he writes poetry, and that he used to play the accordion, but I’ve never seen him do anything you could call a hobby (except cook, which he did better than my host mother). When he was a young man he’d been to Odessa, the Crimea, and the Caucasus, and occasionally he’d speak of it with nostalgia. Every time he’d just about get carried away, then something would tick and he’d stare off for a while and when he returned it was not with the eyes of a young man, but of the old one sitting in front of me, for whom another adventure was––for reasons real and imagined––simply out of the question. The conversations ended there. I’d go to my room, he’d go back to his movie. Nothing ever changed.

Just want to end by saying happy birthday to everybody and happy birthday to Gaga. May 2008 kick ass for all of you.