Last summer, I had a two day marathon of watching the first season of Game of Thrones (catching up after returning from St. Petersburg). Before the second season began, I forgot most of the characters’ names. 

My girlfriend and I talk about the show once in awhile, and I always feel a bit intimidated because I don’t know who she’s talking about most of the time. At that point, I think, This show is difficult to follow. These names are a bitch. 

But then I remember that I’ve studied most of the Russian literary canon and tell myself, “Names are hard? Psh, man the fuck up.” 

In Russian today, we talked about death and traffic. 

This morning, I ate a rye bagel with cream cheese, yogurt with fruit, and drank tea with milk and sugar. Yesterday, I read all the Gospels. Today and yesterday, I have had lots of things on my mind. I haven’t been happier or trusted and cared this deeply for someone this much before. Because of these feelings and having read the Gospels closely, I understand a lot of things better, like Leonard Cohen’s songs, this morning. 

I’ve been missing Russia more than usual. It probably has a lot to do with me being back in Kane County, IL. I keep thinking back to living in Saint Petersburg, the sun never setting in the evening, and sitting at a desk next to a window outside of which I could only see birch trees and other buildings. I could hear children and parents chattering in Russian and singing Russian nursery rhymes. When they’d all head back to their apartments, around midnight when the sky was still bright, all I could hear were the crows. I’d play the really old blues recordings I still had from when I first started learning how to play the guitar. My favorite song on the collection didn’t have a guitar part, and this wasn’t due to the fact that I could set my instrument down for a little while—it was a recording of a chain gang singing together. It’s funny to think that at this moment, in such a small room, listening to the songs of a tethered people, limited by an unimpressive vocabulary of 200-500 Russian words, and realizing that I am pathetically bad at reading city maps, I felt liberated. While I’m here in Sugar Grove, life feels heavier—heavy in the sense that the air hangs heavy during a humid summer day. It feels like I can lift my legs up into the air here but can’t set them down forward in front of me, leaving me only able to march in place. While I was in Petersburg, it wasn’t that I was capable of and necessarily moving quickly in a direction that allows me to make a pleasantly contrast. I could have moved agilely. I felt totally capable of movement but didn’t really want to move. That was the nice thing. I think that the heaviness that I associate with being in Kane County, IL has to do with feeling unable to articulate what exactly I identify with here. When I was in middle school, my friends and I would laugh in art class when we’d scratch two closely spaced black dots onto white paper and call it a polar bear in a snowstorm. When I’m at home, I feel like I don’t have an awareness of where I end and where the rest of Kane County grinds up against me. When I came to the suburbs and then eventually to Rochester, NY, I could feel myself easily. When I lived in Petersburg, the experience was a bit different. I not only felt like I had actual geographic roots, but also felt more aware of things I had ingested over the past fourteen years of my life. More importantly, I felt like I had began crafting a sort of Russian identity alongside my American identity, or perhaps that my American self had become Russified. Even though so much of the work that I do with Russian literature demands fine-tuned analytical skills, it has become both a sanctuary and an anchor while introspecting, which is something I do (perhaps too) often on my own and as a member of St. Anthony Hall. The Russian works that I study and read stand out more clearly than most other things when I think over my life. I think that’s why I brought quite a few Russian books back with me this break and why I’m writing this today, the first day of snow. Today, this snowstorm happens to have turned into a whiteout.