We have celebrated the previous New Year on wheels (in a night train Kyiv-Kharkiv, which took M. and me to the legendary building “Slovo”, pub “The Wall” and dozens of museums, closed for holidays). So, I had every reason to hope to spend the whole following year travelling. That was exactly what happened: 7 out of 12 months have been spent abroad.
To say that such an experience widens one`s mind is to say nothing new. There is neither anything new in telling about revealing the difference between your own and the foreign, digesting the foreign into your own, turning yourself from a foreigner into insider — by a miracle. Such transformations, building new associative chains and non-approbated neural routes, are something like brushing your teeth in the morning: natural, necessary, inevitable.
The thing which remains harder to take up with is the ugly part of reality: visa-refusals (when a random guy in a shelter simply negates your American dream in 5 minutes), shakedowns in night buses (when armed Russian citizens wake you up commanding “take your belongings and go out”), every passport control when you wish you had another passport, security control (when you have to put your shoes off three times per day, in different airports).
Still, you’re eager to cross the borders – on the ground and in the air (travelling by the seas is yet a dream). Love flying, airports, and railway stations. Love coming back home. Particularly returning in the evening, seeing the lights of Maydan from the plane, staying up the half night, drinking tea and talking about your rambling around. As one Arab traveller said, travelling leaves your speechless and then makes you a story-teller.
Your motherland always greets you hospitably. Without any jealous resentment for your admiring the northern or the southern seas. Like a wise woman that easily lets you go, knowing that there is no chance to find a better one in the whole world. And for real, I have never managed to find a better one. Despite my constant need to change the scene and cross the borders – passing from the one to another, conversion, adaptation. I have never found a better one. Yes, my eyes might be just blanched by love. Then why in the world am I suffering from nomadism? Recognizing myself in the escapologist from one Arctic Monkeys song, with no idea what I am running away from.
Demarcation of the centre and the periphery is one of the basic regularities of the universe – and the space closest to the borders is the most exciting and dynamic – there is something sacral going on. That is why crossing the borders is always an initiation, a renewal, and nullification. It is about the adoption of a new hypostasis and adding a new facet to the versatility of human nature – of your own nature. You are accepting, adopting, absorbing and becoming …new.
Then you come back. Then you leave again. You are such a desperate escapologist and such a naive comer back.
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This time, the new year starts in Zagreb – among such weird things as artificial snow and white mulled wine. Having lived here for three months, I can’t help but feel that this city became almost home for me, so I just want to pack up and cross another border another time.
LITTEPLO 