I’m in purgatory, waiting for my appointment with God. Standing in line, waiting for the verdict. Chewing gum with the flavor of afterlife. What does that taste like? A little like cherries mixed with fearlessness — a quiet, absolute taste, slow and meditative, impossible to confuse with anything else.
So apparently now we’re going to count my sins and my good deeds, put little pluses and minuses next to each, and then I’ll go to hell or heaven, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I wonder if He has some sort of special calculator that can measure my life. How much it weighs. How much of everything there is inside it. I hate waiting in lines. It drives me crazy. Seriously — again? First dentists, supermarkets, then “to reach an operator, press one.”
Honestly, I really hope God meets me with a thick Cuban cigar, filling His office with that delicious heavy fog, as if we’re already inside a cloud, like in the paintings of 14th‑century Italian masters. On the table, in a crystal bowl, there would be paradise apples from the Luhansk region. Then God would pour us some homemade Georgian wine and say something like: “So, kid. I cut together what you people now call a ‘reel,’ with all the happy, important, funny, brave, and finally beautiful moments of your life. Everything you wanted to keep inside yourself forever. Everything you wished someone would film — but it was always too natural, so no one ever did. Because the people around you were too busy living the same reality. Or because you were completely alone in those moments. My camera has divine resolution — I shoot on the iPhone‑Infinity with every possible angle, and of course, its storage never runs out. I made this selection based on my own taste, but if you want to rewatch something specific — all the footage exists. Just tell me.”
Here is the botanical garden with the giant cacti from summer Crimea, 2003. Your grandmother. Your dog Becky Thatcher with the perfectly symmetrical white cross on her back. Your first slow dance at summer camp. The taste of cherries. I filmed the moments when you danced in your underwear while taking out the trash, thinking no one saw you. How you rode a bike with no hands. How you fell into puddles and sneezed so loudly people turned around. How you broke your nose and knocked out your front teeth when you were five. The blanket forts under staircases and the long desperate summer downpours. Your first steps and first kisses. Your first work day, first paycheck, first hitchhike and first night in a tent. Mountains, Paris, Rome, and every city.
Every man you fell in love with while riding the same metro car as him — and never saw again. Every student and their drawings. Every seashell you found, tucked tenderly into your jeans pocket, and then lost forever. So much of what you forgot is here. Even though back then it felt like you’d never forget. That nothing like it would ever happen again. You thought you’d never love like that again, never cry like that again. That nothing would ever hurt that much, or be that quiet, that lonely, that tender, or that loud. Your human maximalism always amuses me. Sometimes you thought you were the strongest. Sometimes the weakest. The most beautiful. The most unbearable.
But like all humans, you forgot. You lived through it again and again, dissolving completely into the moment, and then collecting yourself back together, like a self‑charging battery. Or like tide and ebb on the northern coast of Spain. Now you can look at it all from my angle. Not while living anymore. You know, kid — I was always curious, and honestly even jealous, that you humans can feel all this. That you can love this much. So many times in your short lives. Even when you think the pain will last forever — I see it from above, and I know how quickly it will leave, and how soon you’ll love again. Even if your heart feels burnt out or flooded, with ships floating over abandoned underwater cities.
“Love is worth everything — worth your pain, your separations, your disgust and torment, the dog’s violent howling, the madness and the mercy. Worth even life itself. Not to mention death.” That was me speaking to you through Zhadan.