letter to my family

Hey guys I'm really truly sorry about Sunday. I had it all planned out so that I wouldn't forget - and then I forgot. It was late and dark here and we ate some pasta and turned on a movie and my brain turned off. I hope you don't think that this means that I'm not thinking about you - cause it's not true. I feel horrible about the Skype incident - and I was really looking forward to talking to everyone at once. Trust me, it would have been just as cathartic for me as it might have been for you, if not moreso - to see everyone at once. You've all been in my dreams a lot lately and I can't wait to get back to be with you again.

Sometimes I get worried about where I'll live in America or what jobs I'll be able to find, or what programs I should be applying to - I have these moments of panic, and then it all comes back to me - my self-confidence and telling myself - its cool. Give er time. I'm making progress in my life at my own pace and I'm proud of myself (not all the times, but in moments of revelation or something). It's really important to love what you are doing I've learned - otherwise you fall into a bottomless pit of self-doubt and anxiety about your life. Yeah - sometimes I do look at my life and wonder - am I making progress here? Or am I just procrastinating? Am i doing what I said i would do? Of course, I'm not always happy with the answers, but i think that as long as I put the energy out there I think things will come together in the end. I just gotta keep making baby steps in the right direction. Work for experience, not money. That's critical - and I haven't gotten there yet.

I see how your lives are all progressing and sometimes I'm jealous of the stability you seem to have. I know that sounds silly and its not altogether true, I do enjoy these strange situations I put myself in, but I also sometimes wonder - when am I going to have a home? a big awesome kitchen? steady job? a car? a family of my own? and so on. Anywho, I think it takes time. Some people don't get to a place where they are happy with what they are doing until they are in their middle ages. middle ages? i think i meant mid-life. or something.

Why I am I going on a big long rant? I guess I feel like I really let you down and i just want you to know whats going on with me and that I actually think about you all a lot more than you know. I hope you can forgive my lame disappointment. If you ever wanna call me when I'm not on skype there's a thing where you can call regular phones through skype. It works great. You just put like 5 bucks on your skype account and it lasts forever. then you can dial my number (7 812 420 7128) and it doesnt matter where i am or what i'm doing i can get your call. just try and remember that im 8 hours ahead.

Big love, and look forward to talking to you i hope....

Sara

letter to layla

I'm sorry for the shallowness off my interview answers. I felt bad having given the whole interview and not saying damn thing about Russia and the real reason for my love affair with her. And that is evident in the pictures I think. On my first trip to Russia I would walk around with a Baltika (beer) strung to my hip and my camera in hand. the Baltika was enough to take away my hesistancy to shoot photos of total strangers. and even ask - in my most primitive Russian, from looking it up in a book. "mozhno?" i was totally in love with the way things looked. i just wandered around with eyes gaping open at this world. this world that was somehow half built and the way the sun hit the whole thing and the way people carried themselves. i'm sure you can understand this feeling. i was very jealous of jesse when he went away to russia. in a way , he outdid me. he stayed for a whole year. and he left me in new york. that sounds funny, but i was kind of broken over that. certainly i am still very confused about all of it. forever writing letters in my head to him, trying to make sense of the last 2 years. what happened in me and why i did what i did. and while i would gladly take his hand in marriage and have his babies, i feel calm around him lately. when we are all together. as if it is okay - the fact that he has moved on and has no need of relationships. i feel like i can wait.

but i did not say much about russia did i. or my real heart. so i hope you make a sequel. but more importantly, i just want you to know that those answers i gave are quite shallow answers. and im sure you understand they speak little about how complex it all is.

love

fleur

letter to a half-friend: I moved to Russia

sorry I'm such a wanker. It's 8.30 am here in St. Petersburg and I have more than half a dozen emails to respond to that begin with "what the hell are you doing lafloozie?" - I have a lot of time, for some reason I never get to answering all of them. I think its something about writing about being in a place while you are still there - somtimes you have to wait a couple months to digest something before you can actually understand it. In any case, I don't know how it happened but I'm a DJ - thanks to the fact that foreigners here have some kind of elevated status as authorities on music that is not russian (which is what they want to hear in these particular bar/clubs) and so I kind of feel like a wanker but you have to take it as it is, so my lungs burn this morning with first and second hand smoke. my man just pulled out of the lot for finland, from there he will fly to germany to play concerts to nice european people. he is a drummer. he has a mohalk. he is much older. i dont think this is forever, but it is a perfect interlude. i want to be a professional photographer and US WEEKLY in Moscow has purchased some of my pictures (which went into print yesterday) so I feel like I am somewhat on that road. you want to be a writer - I get stressed out just being a DJ - but its free booze and cigarettes and I mean they pay you to play your danciest music, not enough, but enough for it to be worth it. i cannot afford to pay for my beers because i get my paycheck in rubles. and it is miniscule. how do you become a writer? you get up everymorning and write. isn't that what the da vinci code guy said? how do you become a photographer? you get up every morning and shoot. well yeah - i'd say i've been really slacking on the morning front, i need to begin a project on street kids and homeless people and orphans. to get dirty. to leave the music scene and get out onto the social, political scene. you get me? mama didn't pay for no secondary school for nothin.

rodnaia

Rushina says that Pisces are patient ones - that we can see something out. I'm feeling more confident with time - although I do sometimes want to check the astrology book again on how the stars line up for me and this man I live with. We are strangers living together I think - I often feel like he does not know me, not in any deep sense, but that on the practical side of things, we perform magic for each other; he has given me a home away from home, with comfort, support, a starting place to establish my own niche as photographer/DJ/slash interested young person, I stand on his platform of friends, of high culture, and I jump from a higher stone. And I give him - - - what do I give him? he has me to wrap his arms around at night, to unload his dissatisfactions with the professional music world in Russia, to drive around with, cursing out all the other incompitent drivers, to eat out with, to cook beautiful meals for, to pull close to the hip when greeting people on the street, to amaze with his dedication, patience, and unending affection. But I do want to see the books on the stars - I want it to elucidate why we are only a temporary fixture - how we bring the best and the worst out of each other and are fated to one day shake hands and walk in different directions. I like the present moment; it asks so many questions and offers only half-ass answers. It opens strange doors and closes others. At the present, we are perhaps miles apart - at least my backwards leaning heart tells me so. I feel it all the time, everyday and most poignantly in the night - he falls into a comatose sleep and I often lay awake why he doesn't feel this horrible sensation of being incomplete, wondering how he can feel whole in all of this, why he doesn't long for late-night conversations, for lying under the sheets in embrace, for something a little slower, for occasional classical music, music that isn't dance-able, for something a little slower, for my unspoken thoughts. He often wakes up when I leaving the room for the bed in the next room, his limp arm awakens and holds me back. And this is pleasant - that he wants me there in his sleeping embrace.

But I know I suffer from a longing for something that was more complete, more rodnaia. Is it a false nostalgia for an unrecoverable past? Or can I believe in this thing I called love and hope to ressurect it in its perfect, innocent form? I recycle it everyday in my thoughts, in the firm belief that it will greet me again in later years - in the sweetness of a boys hands, in his endless curiousity, his questions and sidelong glance. His slowness. Depth. His music and thoughts. And his heart. pristine. There is something more complete isn't there? And it's not that I don't love this beautiful man who wraps his arms around me - but the fact he doesn't feel imcomplete, that he is satiated with it - I can love him from afar, a beautiful thing - so gracious, but something strikes me inside as empty. empty pipes. no, there are often no fireworks in the heart. and it is in the touch - sometimes altogether lacking. limp. there are dead kisses and a hand on my breast that feels so love-less and brutal. he is in my heart but he often fails to ring it when we are face to face. i want to know him better, i wondered if it was a failure to communicate because of a language barrier, that words do not have the natural flow they have between two native speakers of the same language; that maybe this feeling of really knowing someone, of feeling close to their heart, like a volcanoe that daily erupts and pours hot lava over the chest, that this feeling would come with time, with more words. but i think maybe we are just miles apart and i accept this and i still keep him there, in my heart. but i am forever looking in the side mirror. seeing if there is something else - something closer than it appears.

B.Ginnings

sometimes this is an everyday truth. a kind of surreal nausea that comes with being uprooted. of ignoring the present in terms of whether or not its the path leading to the golden future and walking down it without anyone's advice. the sun can be shining and everyone around can be talking and you sit in the middle of it like a big neon question mark. but this is okay.