When I was 12, I was being motivated. My mother and my grandmother were trying to hand me their picture of the world. And this was 1994. The city of Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. So the pictures of the world everyone carried back then were, frankly, pretty grim.
“If you don’t do well in school, you’re nobody.” “If you get a C for the term, you’ll never see that game console again.” “Nothing in this world is yours.”
Okay — I can understand them. The idea of unconditional love was reaching Siberia by the same routes the settlers once took out of Europe. The weak died along the way.
A couple of years after those conversations I started doing well in school, got the console back, and even got my first weak little PC. But I remembered forever that, beyond that, “nothing in this world is mine.” I kept studying, though.
In 2018 I was living in Barcelona and waking up every morning with a knot of anxiety. I liked my life. But hold on. None of this is actually mine.
I walked along streets and promenades that weren’t mine. I looked at a sea that wasn’t mine. I rode my bike down bike lanes that weren’t mine.
My wife would often say something like “remember our bar in Vilnius?” or “remember our little restaurant in Gràcia?” And something in me would boil up in resistance. “What kind of naivety is this? Where would an ‘our little restaurant’ come from in this world — come on, you silly thing. Didn’t your mother tell you, back when you were a kid?”
At the end of 2019, when I had completely lost myself, I made this entry in my journal for the first time: “What do I dream about?” I asked myself. And from somewhere deep the answer came: “I want to walk along the promenade and know that it’s mine.”
And now, having found myself again, every day I step out of the house, look around, and make this world mine. Step by step.
This is my street. This is my shop, and I know the name of the girl at the register and the boy in the storeroom. This is my bar, and I know the names of the owner, his wife, and the waiters. This is my sea, and I know that if my eyes could only reach far enough, I’d see all the way to the Balearic Islands. And I’d see them, and they would become mine too. And they will.