Fear of known

I am alive every afternoon to an immediate panic gripping my body tight, in anticipation of upcoming known. The thin wire of innovation and razor’s edge of creativity: blunt, stunted, snapping, letting loose, floating. Is this aging? Self agonizing, relentless anxiety, fragmenting, dumping beliefs and previous ideologies. Archives are calling. I look through scans of faded hand produced childhood photos. Soviet born, I come from a place of no return and no existence. It fascinates me eternally. Spending first fifteen years of my life in a place of half baked fallen utopia, iron control and strange hidden cellar-like freedom, longing for color, sparkle, some type of known paradise. U.S.A? A mirage, a beacon of all that is shiny, colorful and new?

America. The insatiable consumption and wild individualism engulfed me with surprising force, sweeping compassion and humanity, into a vortex of deadly capitalism. I became a willing participant in extreme sports of exploitation, self devaluation and fetishization. Still, I yearn to build a home here. I spend all I possess, my youth, my looks, energy, sweat, ideas. Feeding the cannibal, which sucks the blood supply daily, weakening my system in steady, persistent, unrelenting manner.

Designed to drain and discard. I am back to a place of no return. That girl, in U.S.S.R, staring through the shadowy frosted windows, conjured up this place. It’s fiction. Possibly, I’m still sitting there inside a small cramped room, inside of a sickly, grayish anonymously dull brutalist building, inside a dreary courtyard of hopelessness, on an eve of a foggy, gloomy early onset of eternal wailing winds and interminable winter.

I am still broke, exhausted, polluted, misjudged, misunderstood and I am on my knees. Screaming without a voice, my vocal cords eaten away by strenuous overuse from attempting to carve a space inside a void. My vision, blinded, my hands, brittle, my body: decaying with defeat, my legs: overused, feet: blistered, mouth: dried out, due to intense regime of smiling. Smile or else. A stump of a human, simpering, seething, sizzling, bursting: an unwilling bride of capitalism, Americanized woman, lost, false, downgraded, objectified. Washed with soda, stuffed with ads, lost in the walls of shopping and cardboard boxes, dentally neglected and badly digested food. American Dream is a a nightmare. I fear the known.