letter to Liz

It's another one of those vague translations from Russian of mine. The author is quite well known in Russian internet community. Here is the link to her journal if you are interested - http://vero4ka.livejournal.com/ . I really hope she doesn't mind me translating an odd bit or two without her explicid permission. I always feel silly to ask. I am an internet social freak.

***
It is so great – the period of Capital Letters have passed. Before it was necessary to Love and to Suffer, otherwise there was No Point in Life; To Die Young, so you don’t Live till Helplessness, This Is the Last Time I Say “Love You”, This World is Pathetic Imitation; life was interesting, everything was so Important, Serious, always it had a moral, like in a good fable, “No Thanks Needed” or “I Deserved It”; also I liked to write “Curtain” in the end of every, in what was my opinion, brilliant dialog; there was so much things to do, suicide games, big grand preparations for death, all those long letters – really, I don’t remember when I last wrote a Letter, oh, no, wrote to Mike this spring, and before to Alex about two years ago – I don’t practice letter writing at all; well, it was so exiting, all the time you look sideways at someone invisible, tell everyone “no need for dramatics” in such a dramatic way that chandeliers jingle; no, it wasn’t false either, it’s just the way you functioned, with all this conglomeration of adjectives (bitter-sweet, sickeningly loved, languishingly eyed, goldenhaired, Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus – I think human passes the same stages as literature, begins with longwinded fervent hexameter and ends up with a gay football rime), most importantly, I really hated grown up chauvinists, all those madams with understanding faces, “we’ll talk to you in five years”, “dear me, honey, what can you possibly know about it” – I growled and dilated nostrils, no, what can you possibly know about it, dried up people, damn it; I talk with Liz, she is eighteen, she asks “so what, no light at all?”, “what’s next?” “He couldn’t possibly set up all of it” or “it is so terrible – when you’ve got nowhere to go to”, - I feel myself being that madam, that loathsome smirking madam; she is wonderful, my Liz, small and wonderful, I want to pull her to me an give her a hug; Liz, there is no black and white, “with” and “without” light, Liz, there is no Only One, Liz, you know how many of them there will be, you’ll go crazy when you learn exactly how many of them there will be, and by the way, there is charm in alternation, honestly; Liz, it’s the age, there always has to be an age, when they don’t notice you, maybe somewhere between thirteen and eighteen, nobody reciprocates your feelings, and it is right – you learn how to play the guitar, change baggy sweaters to something more appropriate for your figure, cut your hair, gain a bit of experience, cure the spots, become human – imagine what a self-centred moron would you grow up into, if you got it all in the first attempt; Liz, it’s great when it’s nonmutual, when it’s mutual, when it’s anything – as long as something goes on, it’s the worst, when there is nothing; now you think that you Want Your Rest At Last – oh I loved that phrase only, what, five years ago – you don’t want any rest, Liz, take my word on it, rest is a hell for adrenalin-addicted people, which you and I are, we need movement, so there is no time to think, thinking is the death of it; I was thinking all summer long, Liz, I was lazy, sick and thoughtful, it was a horrible summer, I would have been better off dancing and kissing.

Nothing was in vain – if it’s ok, then “God loves me”, if the boy doesn’t call, then “God doesn’t love me anymore” – so funny to think about it, Liz, seriously, we think too much of ourselves when we are eighteen, it seems everyone is plotting how to hurt you; the world is big, everybody has their own businesses, honestly. Everything usually has simple and prosaic causes, no Providence, and what’s perhaps most intolerable – there is no real Endings – neither tragic, nor happy, nothing, everything ends crumpled and infamously, or just plain silly, or it becomes something else; this is the hardest to live with, teachers liked to ask us in school about the Main Idea of the Book – Liz, if a book has a Main Idea, it’s a collection of bullshit and not a book. Everything has to somehow end foolishly, or puzzled, or strange – then it will be like in real life; no happy endings, no ten corpses, it is all fiction, Liz. First of all, nothing ends before you die, and as far as I am concerned there is lots of interesting things after that too.

Oh and also – there is no finite Happiness and Prosperity. Liz, it’s the most horrible. Even if a woman meets a man of her life – or, sorry, a Man of Her Life, - Liz, they live together for two years, or three, or five, and first she stops wanting him, because you never want that which is next to you all the time, then they start to quarrel, so that at least something is going on, then they become jealous, then there appear reasons for jealousy, then the kids grow up and fall ill – Liz, just think, happy mutual love is as much of a horrible trial as a dead calm – you obtained each other, conquered each other from the whole universe, you are together – and? Well, Ok, you travel together. Drink. And the rest. Burt nothing really exiting happens, Liz, and we can’t live without it. That’s it. Fights, reconciliations, sex on big holidays – Liz, it’s horrible. Even with Him! With the One and Only! Liz, “got married and lived happily ever after” – it’s not like they save on words, it’s just there is really nothing to say. All six hundred pages they conquered each other all throughout a month, and then they got married and for the next forty years nothing happens, Liz, this makes you as desperate as the lack of love. There is no finite happiness while you are alive. You wanted a house, you bought a house, and after two years you are as bored there as you were in your previous one; and you will never be satisfied. My problem is that I get bored even quicker than most – happiness is in alternation, Liz, my friend Sergey Gavrilov is right, “when you are alone – you want a woman, when you are with a woman – you want to throw her away and live freely”. But don’t get me wrong, even this is not Terrible and Hopeless and it does mean There Is No Chance for Happiness – no, that’s life, that’s just how it all is, Liz, so much happens, you start to wonder, but Nothing is fatal. You can live with anything. Anything, Liz. Human is viable, adaptable, hellishly nimble creature, no Love till Death, no Sufferings too Great to Endure – everything passes, Liz, passes so quickly that you become uncomfortable that you had created here all this hell, horror and anguish.

And this is great. You suffer from capital letters, from feeling that everything is so incredibly important and unique, and only with you, and only now, and then you notice particularities and details, you start to get lots of pleasure from some futile little things, you stop keeping old stupid junk and in your house and in your memory – live is unbelievably long, it is interesting to live it all though, try it all, learn it all, wait for it all, see how it all turns; no “Don’t You Want for It All to End” – no, I don’t, sometimes I hurt a lot, sometimes I am scared to death, sometimes I don’t want anything for months – but no, I don’t want for it to end, it’s exiting.

The further we go, the more exiting it gets, Liz.

(c) Vero4ka