Much as happened in the last few months since I have really written anything. It is hard to know where to start and impossible to summarize or to explain in much detail everything I have seen and experienced. It is hard to believe I am already back in Piter after traveling for a month, and that white nights have arrived in all their surreal splendor. I can’t believe a year has passed and I am still here. That I am spending another summer in Petersburg. Every time I leave and return to this city I feel like I am re-meeting her and myself, which I suppose makes sense. Where was I a year ago? I was living off the street with the Bashnya, in such ecstasy, excitement, expectation. I have no doubt experienced some of the highest and lowest moments of my life here. I feel like I have aged 20 years in the last few months. Worlds and realities and people can change in a moment. A word. A silence.

There’s something about surviving the winter here, and getting through the daily, gloomy grind when your head feels like it might crack that changes you, hardens and softens you. I’m still in love with this place, but it keeps changing, I guess with me. It was a hard four months locked in Russia, and there are at least a few more still to go. I’ve seen so much. And it’s become so difficult to write in English. I can make my way through spoken English, although I now speak with a strange Russian intonation and with strange constructions. Everything is in little snatches. Which I guess would explain the lack of sense to this post. Or maybe it’s just because I’m exhausted and can’t think straight. I’m having more trouble using this language, honestly.

It is funny that after traveling so much, seeing so many cities, rivers, faces, strangers, alleys, heard so many tongues, and watched so many evenings fall over different horizons that I cannot stop thinking about Petersburg. I thought that perhaps it was just that Petersburg was the main European city I came to as an “adult” (I was too young in Paris) that I thought so highly of it, but after seeing other cities, I realized, no, I have just fallen in love with her, alone. I guess it is in my personality that when I fall in love there is no turning away.

Why do I love this place? Maybe because beauty should not come too easily, so easily. You can trust nothing that comes too easy—something which Russia has taught me. This is a hard city to live in, a hard language to wrap your tongue around with its shifting cases, an incomprehensible and contradictory people. I have no desire for western Europe anymore. Italy holds little allure, nor does the southern Venice, or the lights of Paris again. It’s too easy, or something. Not to be trusted. One must look deeper than the surface, than the museum like cleanness of, say, Prague. I like the east. The less traveled, depressed, dirty, tired side of Europe. I started off my travels in Prague and slowly felt myself more at home as I moved east through Budapest, and over to the Ukraine—a name which means Borderlands. It’s so much more rewarding. I had expected Eastern Europe to be more like Russia in its difficulty to navigate, its absurdity, backwardness, and contradictions, but I have learned that it is, in reality, just Russia—their fallen leader. I have come to appreciate Russia even more, understood her more, in the month I traveled through her former territories, in places where the Russian language is still loathed for the bad memories it calls up. And now I am home to my fuming smokestacks, to these weary canals that slice through the skin of this city, upsetting the geometry of her orderly prospects, to my city that tries to hide behind her makeup of western rationality.

And spring was still fighting on when I left in May. I watched on a Wednesday afternoon sheets of discolored ice on the Neva pass under the bridges, folding under each other and shattering over the granite embankment. So strange to watch snow fall against a sky that is still aglow at 11pm. And the devil walks these streets. And we’ve learned that nothing is ever black and white. Alla told me. When we try to make things black or white everything gets ruined. When things are too clear, clean, beautiful, and simple, nothing can be right. I can understand why the people of Leningrad can still live in this city after piling their dead in the streets, in front of their theaters, turning on their neighbors, eating the plaster from their walls, and even each other.

Now summer has seemed to come almost without me and I am here again, in this insomniac city. Time stops moving, it twists and writhes. I remember not long ago watching a tired, grey dawn rise over Pulkovo 2. Racing down Nevsky prospect at 4am in the back of a taxi, staring out the window, into the flickering lights, the drunks, the empty streets, the ill dawn, glowing buildings, holding hands with someone I loved. How surreal and lovely. And now, another time, the whole city is filling with poplar pollen, which gathers into drifts like white feathers—as if the city is molting like some gigantic white bird. How has it been a year? How strange that I am here, watching the sun slide along the horizon. I am tired and my face is stained. The sallow color of these buildings has seeped under my skin. And the Griboedova reeks again, like it once did when Dostoevsky walked down these streets.
And there are women who prostitute with their eyes. And can you blame them? No. Men here are all drunkards, abusive, adulterous, and die before they even reach 60.
Smiles are lecherous.

And you cannot be angry at people or the world. Just pity this odd, confused thing.
When you wake up in the morning and watch black-eyed men suckling cans of gin and tonic on the way to the metro. When there is blood smeared and dried inside the subway doors. I feel I can take anything and everything. My family was gone in Africa, out of contact for a month and then I left for a month. Friends seem years away. I can’t even call without the phone line breaking off at least 6 times, without Russian radio humming into my ear. Home seems like an impossible idea, that it could still exist. It would be nice, perhaps, to be home, not long. Just a few hours. The night. Enough to lie in my bed, to smell the ocean. I don’t have to see it. And no one would even have to be home. It would be ok even to have to wake up here again, to my twin smokestacks. And it would be nice to be able to walk back 2 years or even 3, and I’d meet you eye to eye. How tired you’ve grown. It was so strange coming back to my home here on Bogatirsky prospect, to bloc housing. Seeing my things. It was as if I were walking into someone else’s bedroom. As if someone had shifted all the objects in the room three inches to the left without my realizing it.
And my brother is still in Africa, where real demons walk the streets and hide in the jungles. The devil is more subtle here.

And you’ll find soldiers with their limbs hacked off rudely. Dizzying monotony. Absurdity. The tourists have arrived. Pudgy American men eat Russian women with their eyes. Everything is for sale here. We’re all just lonely. And I’ve liked watching towns slide by on the way to an ancient city, Pskov. Garbage lined the streets, I watched old couples garden, their houses’ spines shattered. Dirty boots. We went to Kronshtadt, sleepy town of bloody mutinies. Saw buildings collapsing into the Baltic, where men like red ants swarmed over the broken ice on ladders to commit murder. I have wandered through the graveyards of Soviet palaces. And why does she walk down the muddy, empty streets in heels? And such stars there were that night. It was easter in an ancient city. A 4 hour service starting at midnight. Monks with kindly, sunken eyes. Darkness. And we walked with candles in the frozen air around the church, all together. And the sky was almost domed, interrupted by the tops of the churches, gleaming like eternally frozen spring-time buds. How long can you walk with your eyes closed? And I jumped in a snow-run-off waterfall in the northern Caucasus. It was so cold I forgot whether I were in water or air. And one late night we passed through Moscow like a dream. On the way to Sochi. It was as strange as if I’d happened to suddenly pass through Budapest or Brunswick. And then it was gone. Back into the gloom. It is good sometimes to feel trapped. Trains do that. And they do strange things with time, as does this country.
This country is so shattered, fierce like a wounded animal. A land of pain and humiliation, angry arrogance, and the desire for hope.
And then I traveled through broken, dead, dying empires, the empire where Russia stole her slant of Christianity, and her former communist republics. I can’t help but come back, to the Motherland. And I can’t talk and communicate with you anymore.

There is so much humor in misery, in weakness and patheticness. I think I can finally understand Chekhov. Americans don’t understand why he’s so funny. Maybe you have to live here a little while, to keep coming back to Russia like an addiction. They think he’s just tragic. But tragedy is hilarious. Just smile a little at it, and it will smile back. What other choice do we have? And one much accept so much absurdity here. I wouldn’t be surprised to have a part of my body just break off and live its own life around Petersburg, the strands of my hair to split off and start dancing the 4th act of Giselle, or to see ghosts drinking tea off Nevsky prospect at midnight.
How easy it is to let one’s mind slide and to shift and to walk in a fog for days and weeks even, to slip with the spring fog, with the shifting, cracking, frozen winter skin of the Neva, spilling ever into the Baltic. And the muse’s voice is a mosquito’s whine.

I’ve been sick and so worn out, burnt out, joyous for no reason, frozen, soaked, hurt, my complexion has gone to hell, the circles under my eyes have grown, you can see the fine network of veins clearly, my brain and body have atrophied, all the bones stick out in my back like a bird, and I’ve somehow dropped to a staggering weight. But I have drank raki and smoked hookah from rooftops, listened to choking Arabic voices chanting in echo across the burning night of Istanbul, I have explored a church made out of plague victims’ skeletons, lost myself in cobble stone corridors, gone cockroach hunting, watched the stars rise over the Danube, gazed into the shadowed fields of Ukraine as the sky burned at the edges with silver and yellow lightning. There is nothing like spending days on a train, sticking ones head out of a window, smelling so many things that you didn’t even realize you knew the smells of till you close your eyes--leaves, dirt, flowers, sunburnt grass, insects, puddles, streams, heat, shadows, rusted metal, light, dust. I have seen the blackened hands of 1000 year old monks, crossed the black sea, climbed the Odessan steps 7 times, winded through the Crimean mountains that tumble into the black sea while seated on the longest trolleybus ride in the world, and I’ve learned how to sleep without dreams, and how to smile and laugh, and walk. But one can walk all day here in Petersburg and not meet anyone’s eyes, even if you try. When you look for a familiar glance in a stranger’s face. It is so easy to be unnoticed. This city is painfully lonely. It’s always lonelier being around so many people. Nowhere to be alone, yet always feeling alone. The paradox of cities. People come and go and I seem to be stuck here. Days pass as dreams, and sleeping feels more real. But now the city is starting to fall in love with herself, she is stirring, her people refuse to sleep, walking all night, caressing in moonshade, sitting along the gray-blue Neva. One does not dream in June.

So where have I found myself in all of this? What do I see anymore? I have a nose that arches, tired eyes, unruly hair that itches like an old blanket, a narrow chest, I swear, I have a crude sense of humor, a laugh, a wounded Jewish soul that refuses to pretend it knows what it can’t, one that waits, and longs, and hopes, and is never satisfied, that cannot forgive cruelty, with eyes that change colors, that drink in ugly places. And I have an extra rib—some kind of joke of Adam's. I am of a people, who came to this country, of a sad people, ones with broken backs, who love to wander, of a people who know how to wait, who hope but can’t forget. And if there’s nothing I’ve learned here it’s that I can adapt. There is strength in my sore fingertips and swollen eyelids. Not all things can be broken. And Alla told me in her rough language, our language, to thank God for everything you’re given. No matter what happens to you, or whatever mistakes you’ve committed, whatever pain you’ve experienced, thank God for it, because you’ll know yourself, who it is you are, what you can take—see how far it is you really go.

My life isn’t so bad. I am in the granite gray city of betrayal, that tried to be so true, and moral, but we know life doesn’t work that way. Lines of morality and judgment smear, but they’re still there. I can suddenly understand people, even if I feel farther away than ever. I can’t judge as I used to for some reason. People I’ve met here, and people I’ve watched from a distance, in different worlds, centuries, countries. Even on the street, flecks of people’s pasts shine through. Have you been cursed by the dried lips of a mother whose son hung himself over you? Have you come home still bleeding from the unwanted child of your lover to find him in your bed with another? Have you walked door to door asking after the dead? Waited for your fiancé to return from the war only to have him come back with another? Starved yourself slowly? Been tempted by a 7th story window? Seen your husband hang himself before the soviets could find him? But what can be expected? I have been told to expect everything and anything and nothing. And yet there is so much that is so lovely, even if it is so small you have to screw up your eyes to see it, or walk with your eyes closed into a wind so filthy you can taste it.

And I have learned that one can walk and even run with a half shattered spine. Half is enough to walk, and walk, if not enough to dance. And has Mandelstam’s century’s spine healed? I doubt it.
And we flew past, birch forests, green fields, shacks, babushkas selling dried fish tied around their necks and pickles in plastic bags. One can be broken and strong. Russia will teach you that, if you let her. We slid through towns covered in haze, or clouds, or smoke, with the smell of burning wood. In the morning we passed to the side of a valley filled to the brim with fog, white blossoms, bees, and shacks. We slipped into other people’s realities for a moment, looking at their darkened windows, living on swamps.

If Moscow was Russia’s bride, what is sleepless Petersburg? Peter lusted after a foreign mistress. She is fickle, cold, arrogant, spiteful, and lonely. 300 year old corpses still rot under the buckled knees of this granite monstrosity. And she smiles at herself. She can glance with self-conscious vanity at her reflection in her diseased canals. And she’ll smile with her salty mosquito-bitten lips. One can live in a fog. Dostoevsky was right. St Petersburg is a place in which you could quite easily lose your mind.

And what is this city to me? A city of doubt, desperation, depression, loneliness, and such hope. A city built on a swamp, on corpses, on partially realized dreams. A vision of a new empire, of a future out of the darkness. A slighted city that should not exist in the first place, ruined and raped and insulted, waiting to once again be swallowed up by the Baltic. A city of revolutions and wars and starvation. The city slumbers but she pulses and throbs, loathes and boasts. I have learned there is pride and glory in misery. And that misery here is communal, collective, shared. You can feel it. You can share in this country. There is no better place to be no one and everyone. This place has taken me by the throat for some reason. Because of her tortured literature, her broken history, because I came here a year ago with sleepless eyes, that my first love (ballet) came to age here, that her white nights seduced me, because of her throbbing river that Mandelstam once described as a swollen vein, because my own blood runs somewhere here, my century old ghost sings down these prospects, the sister of a failed revolutionary, with her unruly Jewish hair. I wanted to find her here. But Alla told me that my face is thinner. I would smile and tell her—I’ve been looking for you for a century.

When you lose things and you’re far away with nothing familiar you realize how wonderful it is to have such small things, like snow, sunlight, cheerios on a train, a smile from a stranger in a strange country, small gifts. And how interesting life is, if you just step back from it, as if it’s not you. How fascinating. I have had such happiness over the last number of years such that I didn’t even seem to notice it. Such beauty in gasoline-filmed puddles reflecting the sunset behind burning smokestacks. Beauty in the rare glance. Nothing is for granted, and nothing is real. What a great story I’ve experienced, if I could just tell it. Even loneliness is sweet.

Someone once told me on a chilly afternoon in March that this city—Sankt Peterburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, Piter, Petersburg—suited me. I think I can perhaps agree with him on that.