annabelleec

I get assailed with memories rather often these days, particularly for someone my age. I would have expected this forty years down the road, but right now it takes me by surprise that, for example, I am transported to the Yerevan of my childhood when I am just sitting on the windowsill watching it snow outside.

The large snowflakes fluttering down and dancing in front of my window caught in the wind remind me of a brilliantly white cold winter day long time ago, during the “cold dark days” of post-Soviet Armenia. As complicated as life was back then, it was simple for me as a child. All I needed was a book, a candle to read the book by, and something to hold off the hunger (which, more often than not, was not much). In those days my dad was a better man than all the fairy tale princes put together and the best New Year’s present was a large chocolate bar. This specific day was memorable thanks to the snowstorm we got: the largest snowflakes I have ever seen falling down fast, twirling and sparkling, covering everything around with their clean, soft, brilliant whiteness, making the world just a touch more magical. My dad and I opened the windows wide (it was freezing inside anyway), stuck our heads out the window and tried to see who could catch more snowflakes in their mouth: potential colds and sore throats be damned!


Snow by Larry Price

So after I wrote about my “first love” here I had been thinking back a bit and found that periods of my life could be marked by the men present in it starting all the way back in daycare.

Fast forward from daycare to first grade. I am the class president (if there is such a thing in grade school), an exemplary student, “good girl” brought up on all the fine communist ideals, passionately yearning to be a pioneer, or at least an октябренок, wearing my brown scratchy woolen uniform, and my starched white apron proudly on holidays, with my imposing bows on my pigtails. I sit in the front row, right by the teacher’s desk, next to Artyom. Murad sits behind me, next to another boy. I’m always stern with the boys, but I wonder if they can see through the act: I’m loving the attention, and I know that my coolness invites it even more. I feel a poke in the back and warmth in my belly, but I don’t turn. Another poke. And another. I am calm, I am cool, I am a Buddhist monk in his Zen state. Finally my braid gets pulled (God bless cute old Soviet movies, and the fact that they taught me that this was part of flirting with boys). I turn around and slug Murad hard on the shoulder. The scuffle continues during the lunch break.

I go home with an unraveled braid, some new bruises, and a firm opinion that this boy likes me.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Both of my parents were gone for about the week after the tragedy struck on December 7, 1988. Both were in the disaster area: my dad with a shovel, digging; my mom with the relief workers. While both saw a lot of pain in that one week, the story that has not left me since was something that I overheard my mom recounting.

There was a little girl in one of the field hospitals that were set up in Spitak who had just undergone amputation of both legs. Her legs had been caught under a cinder block for far too long. By the time she was found in the rubble her legs had become gangrenous below the knees. As she came to after the surgery she started crying in the strange surroundings full of other suffering patients and asking for her parents who had not been found after the eathquake. To pacify the child a nurse started talking to her about the upcoming New Year and asked the girl what she had asked Santa for.

- The red patent leather shoes with bows that are in the department store display window.


Loneliness by Alexander Bostan

Rivers of hopelessness flowing down my face, washing off yesterday’s makeup and today’s hopes. A really pissed off little something pounding angrily on my left temple from inside. I cower from the light: it makes the little bastard pound with renewed urgency.

Sometimes the feeling of despair is for nothing else other than for the misery that’s already come and gone. Pain for all the pain experienced earlier.

I’m a happy, “let’s fill that glass up all the way” kind of person. But then waves of this murky suffocating anguish come in like a tide and stay. Joy wiped out. Hopes torn to shreds. All I want to do is hide from myself and wait.

Like the tide it will go away.

I think I’ve always been a big believer in miracles. Even when completely disappointed with life, I’d smell the magic in the air, and just be convinced that something good was bound to happen. When it did – “I just knew it”, when it didn’t – “Well, maybe next time I need to have a little more faith”. This is especially unavoidable around Christmas time. It smells like snow and enchantment outside, like evergreens and wood fire inside. How can you not make a wish and believe that it’s going to come true?

Most people believe in Santa Clause until they are school children, then some know-it-all milks all the pleasure out of breaking the news that Santa isn’t real. Well, I was stubborn even as a child. If somebody else’s Santa wasn’t real, it wasn’t my problem: they may have been naughty and only gotten the knock off. I had the real thing. He showed up every year, in the morning on January 1st, with his long white beard and a booming voice. Always scared me a little, told me to be a good girl and listen to my parents, and gave me the presents I had been coveting all that year.

Magical!

And then one year, when I was about 10 years old, Santa wore my dad’s khaki pants. That was the first step towards adulthood.

One of my earlier memories from the good old Soviet days is how we used to line up in front of the old TV (one of these giant dinosaurs, complete with legs and rabbit ear antennae, everything) to watch either Kashpirovski stare at us from the screen or hear Gorbachev wax on about perestroika or the cold war. The distortion of the picture on the TV screen would be fixed with a few hardy thwacks, sometimes on the top, or, depending on the direction in which the distortion lines went, on the respective side. Some of the mementoes that my mother saved from those days include a “letter” to president Ronald Raegan scribbled by me at the ripe age of about 3 or 4, when I had just recently learned my letters (so there were some legit words, like my own name, in addition to just doodles), telling him to stop the cold war and promote the friendship of our nations. Another priceless keepsake is a candy dispenser I made in the form of Mikhail Gorbachev, complete with the birthmark on his bald head. Yes, I was a creative child, thank you.

Another early memory is that of the morning on December 7th, 1988. I was in kindergarten and we were just sitting down to lunch: it was some kind of soup. I remember that Inessa and I went for the same heel of rye bread and then ended up splitting it magnanimously. My bowl of soup had a large potato in it that soon started splashing about in the liquid. I thought Inessa was rocking the table: she had done it before, except this time it wasn’t funny, she was going to upset all the plates. I still remember the smell of that soup, and then the panic on the teachers’ faces and in their voices. I remember being told to grab on to the person’s hand on the right and to go outside as fast as we could. It was a sort of a game for us. The reality of what had happened did not hit when my mom took me home and I saw her little Chinese statuette on the floor, beheaded by the hard fall, or the crack in my living room wall. Nor when my mom refused to let me out of her line of sight for the rest of the day, and so she took me to work with her, where she feverishly dealt with issuing visas for all the foreign aid workers. The reality hit when I was taken to my aunt’s house, and my cousin, my aunt and I huddled by the space heater in front of the television watching the gruesome scenes of other people’s reality unfold on the news. Not the best of of my childhood memories, but most certainly one of the most distinct.

I guess it is that time of year: time to remember.

Before your first day at the new job you feel anxious: a nauseating mixture of excitement and fear. You work on your breathing skills before walking down the isle. You look out of a plane, about to jump with a parachute strapped to your back, and your mind goes blank. You are afraid, your heart is pounding, you are exhilarated, but a giant part of it is fear. And quite frequently this fear is not of crashing and burning (be it yourself, or at work, or in your newly begun family life) but rather of the fact that you don’t know that you will not crash and burn. There are no guarantees in life, no backup chute, no lifeline. You dive in headfirst, without seeing the murky bottom, wondering if you are going to crack your skull open. Maybe that’s a part of the attraction. But maybe, just maybe, this recklessness is unwarranted, and when the regrets start hitting in a form of an acute midlife crisis, you can soothe the feelings of regret and wistfulness with a nice shiny sports car (preferably a red one). No harm done. And your skull is safe and sound and in one solid piece.

On the other hand, кто не рискует, тот не пьет шампанское.

Somehow, way back when, I had gained the reputation of a freak. Not quite sure what it was that I had done, because at this point it was mostly wanting to do but not having the freedom to do it quite yet. But yet, somehow, I was wrong. The neighbors would call my house to inform my parents of the poor job they were doing raising me. I think I wondered for about a moment if I really should behave in some other, more decent, more appropriate way: I was obviously աննամուս, but as to why, I could not tell you. So I dismissed the thought, and after a while pissing people off became my main form of entertainment. If I didn’t get a head shake, or tongue clicking, or muttering under one’s breath, I would think that I was losing my fine form. I wasn’t really acting out, I did harmless things: things like coloring my hair with blue mascara, or putting in a fake lip ring, or running around in a goth floor length purple gown. The ballsiest thing I did then was sitting in the passenger seat next to the driver of a marshrutka in that same goth dress. I think there was also some purple lipstick involved.

At the ripe age of 16 I told myself that I wasn’t letting other people’s opinion of what I should act like control me: “I don’t care what they think, and may they all go to hell in a handbasket”. Now looking back I see that my rebellion was exactly that: letting other people’s opinion affect me. It was kind of like in the Jungle Book “мне столько раз говорили, что я человек, что я и сам поверил в это”. Since I was thought of as strange anyway, I might as well live up to the reputation. To this day I am not quite sure if the preconceived notions influenced the behavior, or if it was the other way around. What came first: the chicken or the egg?

It took a while to realize that letting someone else’s opinion influence you in either direction is equally bad. People will think what they want anyway, no point in trying to confirm or deny anything. The only person you have to stay true to is your own self.

Today was yet another crisp but sunny day that makes you want to hang on to the remnants of autumn. But winter was in the air, if not in the form of chilly temperature, then at least in the form of obviously quickly approaching Christmas: the city was strung with lights, there were wreaths and Salvation Army collection kettles galore, and throngs of people were out shopping for presents. Sights like these typically make me melancholy, but not today. Today I was in a stubbornly good mood, which refused to flag for anything, and so I walked up Michigan Avenue absorbing the spirit of the season and smiling.

I smiled at the skinny hipster boys in girls’ pants and with eyeliner on; smiled at young mothers, who were taking up most of the sidewalk with their baby strollers and shopping bags; smiled at artsy girls in thick-tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses who smoked huddled at the Art School entrance; smiled at overly groomed gay boys with Louis Vuitton shopping bags, at the middle age balding fathers with their high school-aged daughters who clearly thought that monogrammed Coach bags were the epitome of high fashion; smiled at the cute asian couple in matching getups, at the black guy with dreadlocks past his ass, at the stern looking middle aged women with indefinite hair color, at the bored looking police officers spitting into their Dunkin Donuts cups, at the toothlessly grinning homeless, at the street performers; smiled at the irate looking high-power men waiting in the street and smoking while their wives gave the American Express Black a nice workout. I smiled at the horse drawn carriages that slowed down the already slow holiday traffic, at a mother and daughter whose way of holding and drinking their coffee gave away the fact that they were mother and daughter; smiled at a couple of boys who smiled back at me, smiled at the cool architecture of the city and a couple of brownstones that reminded me of Boston; smiled at the tripped out turquoise sky striped with wispy pink cirrus clouds; smiled at the moon high in the sky at 4:30 in the afternoon.

Happy almost winter! May the cold outside be contrasted by the warmth inside your hearts.

There has always been something amusing-uncomfortable for me in the concept of Hollywood’s six degrees of separation. Seems like everyone is dating a friend’s ex-boyfriend or an ex-friend’s boyfriend or something in that vein of thought. My overactive imagination rests a lot easier when I don’t have the constant reminders of my partner’s murky past marching in front of my eyes on a daily basis, or what’s worse: looking dazzling on the red carpet, while all the tabloids are dissecting my new unsuccessful dye-job every which way. Well, I told myself, Hollywood is small. My world, on the other hand…

I think I had been away from Armenia for far too long. And you thought Kevin Bacon had it rough! While the little Yerevan society yearns for Hollywood glamour, we have most definitely achieved some aspects of the Hollywood lifestyle already. You meet someone, hit it off. The next day the friendly reports start coming in. Turns out this fascinating person with sparkling eyes has a past, a past that all the friendly helpful people are dragging into your present. And then, small world that it is, you see this past trotting down the street, you feel the obligation to smile and say hello (so much for the fakeness of Hollywood), and in the meantime your overactive imagination paints masterpieces of cellulose romcoms, and your insides feel like they are being dragged through the street.

Our natural propensity to live vicariously through the lives of others and to be “well informed” makes this game all the uglier: nothing is secret, nothing is sacred. Every misstep is monitored, recorded, and then discussed in an open forum. Missteps are actually encouraged: they make for better coffee-time conversation.

Trying to get used to this lifestyle will probably take time. In the meantime, if it’s a scandal you want, I’ll do my best to provide something dramatic to chew over in true and glamorous Hollywood style.

I sit and I ponder the concept of killing time. We say it so often, and we do it more frequently still: “Oh I had some time to kill so I watched enter-the-name-of-a-useless-so-called-reality-show-here”. We are all taught: “thou shall not kill”, but we refer to “killing time” so carelessly, so casually. This may seem as a joke. It is not. Realistically, unless one is a hardened criminal, time is the worst thing one could be killing on a daily basis, without even giving it a second thought. Once wasted, it cannot be brought back, recycled, reused, relived. We hear “live each day as if it were your last” but we still keep biding our time, waiting for something in the future, dreaming of the pleasures of times past, building castles in the sky, and in the middle of all this forgetting to notice the precious grains of sand filling the bottom of an hourglass.

But right now time seems crystallized, frozen, and I just lay there deep in my enchanted slumber waiting for some Disney magic.

Just don’t wait too long.

With the screaming silence filling the void between the rest of the world and me I sometimes feel like my head will explode. Not quite sure how I let it get this way: I am typically so cautiously guarded. But love does this to you, strips you of all your defenses, makes you vulnerable, makes you face the cruel world outside on your own.

I have decided what my next tattoo is going to be. The word fragile somewhere visible in big fucking letters.

Where do we go from here?

The alluring Chicago skyline with all its architectural wonders is shimmering outside my window, with some of the lights reflecting off the peaceful black surface of lake Michigan. I sit up here, on the windowsill, some 100 meters above the ground, look at all of this, ponder the grandeur of human architectural and engineering genius, and wish to trade it all for the view of my dusty old little city with the backdrop of Ararat. I want to trade all of this for the smell of my city first thing on a spring morning after it has rained all night, for the magical colors of the blushing dawn coming to life hesitantly, shyly above the mountain ranges on the horizon, for the bright stars twinkling above the sweltering city in the unbearable heat of August, for the intricate frost designs that winter paints on the windows of my old apartment as a Christmas present.

Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” is playing on repeat and I really do wish… Or maybe that I was there. Either way, I miss home and I miss the crooked smile of those dearest lips.

The thing I loved most as a child was listening to the nightly stories of my parents. However, unlike most children I did not insist on fairy tales or made up stories, but rather on the chronicles of my parents lives. Maybe that was when I realized that life was really much more interesting that fiction. One thing is for sure, that was when I realized I wanted to travel, to see the world, and maybe one day to be telling my own little one about “the time I was in Italy”.

For the last few years I tried my damnest to go someplace I haven’t been before at least once a year. One thing I came to realize (which is both a blessing and a curse): no matter where I am in the world Yerevan is still my point of reference, everything is always compared to “how things are back home”, and a positive review sounds within the lines of “oh this is great, it reminds me of home”.

I was going through my pictures of the Italy trip and remembered that it really did remind me of home somehow: the people’s attitudes, the yummy food, the fact that men checked you out in the street quite shamelessly (yes, I missed that, damn it!). All the history, all the art, all the architecture was a dream come true. Things I had only read about were coming to life in front of my eyes. And most of the time my words were failing me (all that was left to me was to swear; a lot). But there was something more, there was just something magical in the air, particularly in Tuscany, that made you want to stay, explore, be a part of this secret enchanted life that went on behind the green shutters in the sunny yellow houses.

And yet somehow, even the allure of this magical country could not displace the nostalgia for my home.

I miss you, my Yerevan.

( A few of my Italy pictures )

It amazes me sometimes just how little I need to drown in misery for days, and then just the opposite, how little to skip around grinning, my heart dancing my in chest, swelling with joy, my unbounded happiness filling up the whole of me, spilling out into the streets around me, coloring the world into the brightest colors of the rainbow.

What has caused this uplift in spirits are the memories from my birthday this year.

I had been dreaming of spending my birthday with my family and friends for 9 years now. The first birthday for which I was away was my 17th. I remember sulking and wondering if anyone would even know that it was my holiday today. Some did, I got some birthday cards, but that only made things worse. If it was completely ignored I could just stew in self-pity. But now self-pity was not warranted as I was not lonely, although this was an unsatisfying comfort, one that left me craving for the people I truly wanted to celebrate with, ones that would actually want to celebrate the day I was born.

Another birthday that underlined my loneliness was my 23rd. I was spending my birthday weekend on Martha’s Vineyard with the man that I loved: the weather was marvelous, the sand was warm, the water the exact reflection of the deep blue sky, and the wind smelled of the remnants of the summer past. I had woken up early and gone out on the balcony to watch the sun come up. The cup of coffee in my hand smelled like morning, the quaint street under the balcony was lighted up by the rising sun and looked like a scene from a movie. I inhaled the crisp ocean air deeply, let out a breath and started bawling. Never in my adult life had I wanted “my mommy” so much.

And so this year I was determined to be surrounded by my loved ones, the ones that have been around for a long time, and will be around longer still.

The birthday was fabulous: starting from the sunrise, accompanied by cake and wine and wonderful presents, to the now traditional Thursday morning breakfast at Art Bridge, to the visit to my church, St. Hovhannes, to getting my hair done and feeling really pretty for my party, to my typically crazy atypical party at Kovkas (cannot forget to mention the live music!), to the wrong people missing the party, to the right people being there and being there for me, to a cup of cappuccino and a cup of moka shared until after it was not my birthday any more. It was a happy day for me. And I am happy still just remembering about it.

THANK YOU!

Ever since my early teenage years (like a good little namoosov Armenian girl) I dreamed of having tattoos. I remember being 13 or so, liking Aqua (yep, I've done it), and just going ga-ga over Lene Nystrom's tattoo. "One day..." I told myself. Whenever I mentioned this to people, they thought I was cracked. I supposed most everyone thought I was cracked anyway. I got told "You'll grow out of it" a lot. Well, anyway, here we are some 13 years and 8 tattoos later, and I still haven't grown out of it. Now it's not even a matter of what to get and where to get it (I have quite a few ideas waiting their turn), but simply a matter of finances.

Anyway, I felt like putting up pictures of my tats. So there...



( 2 more )

I open my eyes with difficulty, my lids don’t want to come apart, and I slowly remember to reproach myself silently for falling asleep with my contacts in yet again. The traces of my dream flutter around my head for a few more seconds and then they are gone before I can catch a snippet and bring the dream back. The only thing left of it is the residual pleasant feeling that only happy dreams can bequest. I ponder that maybe the dream was about you. And so, before I have even fully woken up, you invade my mind, marching on confidently, as if it belongs to you already. I don’t put up a resistance. I haven’t in a while now. I just smile at the cockiness, which you have even in my daydreams, which doesn’t even leave me a chance. I just smile.

Some people collect stamps, I collect annoying hairdressing salon names.
The collection thus far:
- SnipIts
- HeadQuarters
- A Head of Time
- Shear Excitement
- Shear Madness
- Ann All New Look (the owner's name was Ann)
- Silvar Shears (here I'm assuming the person's name was Silvar)
- Cutting Edge
- Git'R Cut
- Shear Accuracy
- HeadRest

They say that is it good to push the limits sometimes, to test how far you can go, how much more you can do. I wonder if that’s what I’m after when I get absorbed in my all-consuming masochism. I hurt, a little, not something worth giving into or crying about. And then I push, I scrape around all hidden nooks of my brain, I pull out suppressed thoughts, forgotten fears, unanswered prayers and I let the desperation wash over my soul until it is stripped bare of all its defenses. What say you now? Does it hurt? How about now? Jabbing a sharp pointy finger at festering wounds that are not allowed to heal. Remember you wondered what it was like to feel, feel acutely, feel the way you think only you can. Here you are.

I wallow in my pain occasionally wondering just what kind of perversion would induce someone to do this to herself.

But I feel.

Therefore I am?