If I Can Get The Courage

Photo by Vivian Chambers

I think I’m getting closer to the person I am truly. It’s a very difficult, aching process, and anxiety only makes me backtrack. But I know what I like. I like to analyze, I like to consume, I like to write. I really love to write — how the words boil together, like my mothers’s суп с фрикадельками. I can barely call myself russian anymore.Ii want to recover that part of myself but it’s so difficult when you’ve been submerged in AMERICA so long. AMERICA is everywhere. AMERICA holds your hand to its heart. AMERICA makes you pledge. Russian-american, that sentence is contradictory. They can’t co-exist. I wear shirts my dad brought me from chelyabinsk, and I pause on each letter. It’s become pig latin to me — something I could hold a conversation perfectly in as an elementary schooler, now forgotten and left behind. AMERICA’s made me believe I’ve outgrown it. But yes, I love being russian-american, contradiction aside. And I love art, I adore it. contemporary museums are my absinthe, curation of aesthetics is my whiskey, and Instagram influencers are my vodka. I can’t live without seeing that process, without seeing a concept, a personal and raw and complex and beautified concept, come to life. In a canvas or a face or in a book. good art is timeless. Good art transcends. Good art makes you stop and want to understand, want to connect with it. And I’m never going to cease looking for that. And figuring out how to make it. Most of all I love young people. I love how hilarious we are, we are all actually so stupid and full-of-heart that it’s ridiculous. 

And fascinating. We don’t know shit, yet we act like we know everything, and we fall and get up and fall and get up and cry and scream and laugh and confide and make mistakes (sometimes fix them, sometimes don’t) and mess with people because of our own securities and love people who have their attention on some other temporary love and eat what we’re told not to and want to die and (most ridiculously) want to live. Existence isn’t enough for a sixteen year old. You must be recognized. You must understand how to give and take in a way no one else does. All fear, at our age, is innately illogical. true youth is the antidote of hesitation, just as it should be. I don’t know who I am, but I know who I want to be. And I know a bit about how to become it. I want to do everything there is to fucking do. I want to be known as fearless, perplexing, witty, and oddly vulnerable. I want people to know me but not understand me — je sais mais je ne comprehends pas. I crave to live in every city in the world, but only to move when I fill a journal about its every crevice and cafe and craving. I want people to be drawn to me, to be influenced by me — while I am untouched by all but few. I want to have a naturally charismatic presence. My hair is best unbrushed. My eyes are best staring. My clothes are best black. I will be fluent in russian again — and french, italian, maybe a bit of japanese. Realism will be something I only use when someone claims I can’t (besides doodles of plants, cats, and the occasional nude). conceptualism, existentialism, my soul that will be sixteen forever: the only references i need. I will grasp the world just the way I like it. If I can get the courage.