LoVE AnD DuST
By EngLisH TEaCHER R
(Editor's note: This neatly formatted version does no justice to the original, typed on a battered piece of cheap paper on an antique manual typewriter, laden with typos and xxxxx corrections. Observe photo.)
After a plethora of days and months I have returned. I fell from my plaid pattern and restitched myself with a South-Western Russian woman. A rumor seems to be split across the whole of this torturously honest land. This rumor which floats about tells of a region that lays in the Southern part of an ever-running river long ago sprung from a dynasty, a river called Volga. The rumor goes that the most beautiful, seductive, covertly venomous, torturous and in the end victoriously destructive women are to be, as I write this now and sometime before, mercilessly dictating the peeling streets of this region, perhaps due to the banishment by Catherine the Great of all beautiful women and their prostitute counterparts in Russia to this region of the Volga.
Many months have passed of international promiscuity and now, only after a couple of weeks of arriving further East into the heart of Russia, I met her. I was instantly intrigued and inhumanly tormented by an intense desire to involve myself with her, both sexually and to the furthest extent emotionally. Her name shall be "Katya" for I do not even in a silent whisper wish any negativity to be expounded to her or any disgraceful accusation be made at or held above her. I would fervently detest anything or any malevolent person who may attempt to lay shade upon that soul of the most beautiful and lightest variations, but where the darkest clouds gather to unite. Such a soul of which had been completely alien to me before that airless night where senses were as absent as sobriety. It it to her that I humbly bow and without closing my eyes, hope that this anecdote will end well.
And so with that I begin my first year of a Russian secret, a secret of love, light, happiness and a surreal reality of a heavy freedom which glooms in the eyes and in the smiles of all who have exploited it internally and express it through debauchery.
With Russian dust in my chest I kick another stone out of my path. Hopping gaily over a dead dog and then cautiously swerving out of the way of a stumbling and mumbling drunk with a metal bar in his fist. A summer sun evaporates the wind and bronzes my neck. Many cars, of a restricted selection, peel past without guidance. I turn my head to buy a pocketful of seeds and nuts of various types from the prehistoric woman seated behind numerous burlap sacks filled with such treats. Mechanical, quiet, sturdy, and explosively emotional this hard Russian grandmother derives from a habitual mummification and a liver corroding consumption of that Orthodox life-giving nectar, Vodka.
With a pocket of treats and yet another Russian beer hanging from my fingers the same epiphany returns once again to me, here in Russia, that "I am not alone, I belong, I am only one, but I am all." I smile at the street and scratch a tear away. I continue down the street.