#4: Farhomesickness
April 24
Today I realised that warmth here has become the sole comforting thing but only just before it comes and a moment it starts fading away, the cool air brings anticipation. When the hotness of the summer city day comes, you again don’t know what to do and where to go. Same when the sun sets and the air becomes instantly too fresh to enjoy.
I spent many years waiting for many things to happen. Getting ready, planning, investing immense resources and countless hours into never-ending projects. After all these years, that should have taught me something, but alas. Even if I learned something, I don’t know what it is.
Leaving Russia was one of these projects. I couldn’t find myself at home anywhere in Russia, it even led to some weird effects like this prominent uncaging feeling I got every time crossing the Russian-Finnish border on the way to Helsinki — once a Russian officer stamped my passport and I exited the building — it was always like there had been a heavy rain, wind and darkest overcast inside my head and then the sky was instantly clear and everything was calm and little birds started unnoticeably chirping. Of course, that was all happening inside my head, and no one but me was responsible for my feelings, but we’re social animals — surroundings affect us in all possible ways, so even I myself don’t have the courage to blame myself for not being able to build protective borders strong enough to help me with all the upsetting reality around that produced stormy weather inside my head.
With my first and last psychotherapist to whom I turned for help with bottomless apathy and everlasting all-consuming weakness, I cancelled our sessions shortly after he admitted that he felt my helplessness after a couple of sessions that brought no results. It was fine in the beginning, we were presumably fixing some early childhood problems, but then I reminded him why I decided to start our sessions — to try and find some energy that could be used to escape the country — after that, I’d be happy to fix everything else, but while in Russia, fixing the past was a luxury I couldn’t allow myself while my present getting darker each and every day. We spent a couple of sessions visualising the problem and the picture turned out to be an apocalyptic ghost city covered with a transparent dome, where sun was burning everything, but you couldn’t see shadows because of uniform clouds and thick brown dusty atmosphere, with only me being alive and made of flesh. Me, lying helplessly on the ground, surrounded with four or five of other me’s all arguing about the best way to escape: find a high-pay boring job and go wherever is possible, start a new life once you settle; drop your IT job, focus on music, become recognised, get a talent visa; drop your ‘stable’ job, focus on one of your start-up ideas, get a start-up visa and investments; sell everything but the laptop and the guitar, and go busking in Europe or the US; etc… All possible. All uncertain. All radical. Nothing gradual, step-by-step and little-by-little, except leaving everything as it is and working in all directions without visible progress anywhere. With anticipation of something good happening in future being the only thing that keeps you going.
I changed many rooms and flats here during the last month, anticipating that ‘tomorrow we’ll find a place for our team to stay and so we’ll move in there and all this endless flat-hopping will finally stop’, then, once we found a place, or, better said, decided that we’ll rent the first house that we checked, I got something else to anticipate — the day we’ll be allowed to move in. The problem is, it’s not going to end there, obviously. It’s not like I plan on staying here for a long time, it’s more of a temporary base for me, and once we settle here, I’m going to continue my work on establishing a European or an American branch. And there’s not even a hint of a clear and definite timeline, obviously.
In most of the places where I stayed here I was waiting for a new one, that would hopefully be better, because I’d learn from my mistakes, but… the variety of problems is just too vast here.
My first place, being the classiest one, had vintage windows looking onto a loud downtown street. My second place, the quietest one, was the one I actually couldn’t complain too much about, though the Internet connection was barely working (but it’s in fact a very common problem here). My third one, having again a feeble internet connection, had an uncontrollable gas water heater and towels with bed linen that likely saw the dissolution of the USSR. My fourth one had a smell of cigarette smoke even though it was listed as a smoke-free place, and despite being a flat in a modern building, it had all the possible problems with windows that I couldn’t close, so I had to listen to draught during the night as well as many industrial air conditioners placed in the yard for some reason, not to mention two power sockets per room in the most inconvenient places and half of the lamps working; oh, and the bed that made my back ache. Fifth place appeared to be a soviet-like flat that was barely renovated before listed for rent, where the owners decided to cover the bedroom floor with a new layer of varnish just before I moved in, so I had to sleep in a common room on a bad post-soviet couch; kitchen utensils were not even ‘post’-soviet, they obviously had seen a lot; and the dogs barking from 2 to 5 AM every night — not the landlord’s fault, but still. Happily, I found the solution for the dogs, though it took three days to partly fix it — you need to call some organisation and tell them there are stray dogs barking in the night. The problem is, they work 9 to 6, when the dogs are usually quiet or magically disappear. And then we come to the sixth one, which turned out to be overbooked, so they rented me a room in a hotel, which turned out to be a very nasty place even though it cost twice as much.
I hope I experienced all this only because of the unprecedented demand and all decent places being already taken. But there’s still a glimpse of doubt, because Montenegro, not being overcrowded at all, was not too different. And I can’t help noticing many other similarities between these countries, like litter everywhere, okay-ish facades with terrible yards, over-expensiveness of non-essential things, careless and reckless drivers, etc. I guess it’s just all connected with poverty and a post-soviet touristic ‘audience’ that doesn’t care about such things. I should say though that Yerevan is a little more civilised than Montenegro in general, perhaps because they see a lot of tourists from France and the US every summer.
Soon I’ll move into a decent house. There’s even a decent piano in there, though I didn’t inspect it too much, so maybe it’s not in a good condition, but it seemed to be tuned and keys were producing sounds. There’s only one problem with local houses: it can be as luxurious as you can imagine, but just over the fence there’ll be slums of all sorts mixed with other decent and luxury homes. The contrasts of Asia at their best.
