Home

I grew up in an average post-Soviet family. In a panel house, in a rented one-bedroom with cockroaches and a playground in the backyard. The doorframes did not fully attach to the walls and you could grab on the top and hang down from them. I climbed onto an armchair with green upholstery, which stood near the bedroom door, I climbed on a wooden armrest and hung down with my fingers hooked on the doorway. Misusing the environment is perhaps one of the main sources of happiness in childhood.

In those days, I loved buckwheat so much that I could eat a whole pot, I left an apple core equal to 70% of an apple and slept badly at night, convinced that Sleep Lady would come for me - a snow-white, lifeless woman. She’ll come and take me away forever.

Like any self-respecting child, I tried desperately to kill myself. Our apartment was on the second floor and I remember how I hung from the window assessing the distance to the ground. I wanted to tie the sheets together and climb out of the window to the ground The only obstruction on my way to success in this were the parents, who were always somewhere nearby. At times when I was not preoccupied with a potential career of a window-sheet engineer, I ran around a lot and fell a lot, I was interested in everything and anything that could cut and stab, and one night I took my dad's pencil with me to bed. Dad sharpened pencils like an artist, an architect's son, sharpens them. So the tip of the pencil becomes sharper than a kitchen knife. I remember lying in bed and bringing the pencil to my nose, moving it away and back towards the nose again. Closer and my eyes meet funnily in the muddle, further away - I can see normally again. And then I wondered if I would manage to hit the bridge of my nose if I’d pull the pencil close to my face very fast. I stabbed myself. Bullseye. I got it. Exactly on the bridge of the nose. There is still a small grey dot right in the middle of my nose bridge. My only tattoo.

My average post-Soviet family had an average post-Soviet climate. Mom started working when I was 5 years old. Household chores, my pigtails and kindergarten in addition to work were, of course, on her. Parents argued loudly and lot with each other and often with me. What we now call emotional and physical abuse was then called child upbringing. I had one terrible move against that. Sometimes I’d call my grandmother and complained about my mom. Then my grandmother scolded my mother for scolding me. Profit.

In 1997 we moved to our own apartment. I lived there for 16 years. In that apartment, I experienced the onset of depression and hallucinations. There I was lying on the couch and listening to sad songs, thinking about my first unrequited love. From this home, I was driven by a personal driver to my private school. There I hugged a huge white dog and slept together with a kitten. There I got drunk for the first time and told my mother I that I was smoking and that, of course, I was soon quitting. To this place, I dragged a piano that I bought with my own money. There I did not sleep at night, trying to complete the film-school assignments on time. My parents got divorced there. There, after the divorce, my mother and I sorted all the things that had accumulated over decades and threw out bags after bags of what was no longer needed. From this apartment, I took trips to a grocery store with a small bag of coins - the only money we had - to buy some food.

In 2013, my friends came there to help us pack our whole lives into boxes, because the bank took this apartment after dozens of dishonest courts. That was my last common home with my mother. This was my first and last home of my own. From there I went to live on other people’s folding couches for almost a year until I finally made enough money to rent a place (or rather a room) of my own.

For many months I woke up and did not understand where I was. It took me 2-3 minutes to assemble reality into a coherent picture.

Now I live in Norway, in another country, in another city, but sometimes I dream that I am in Moscow. On Sivashskaya street, building 7/1, in apartment 77 on the 5th floor. Then I wake up and can’t understand where I am. It takes me 2-3 minutes to assemble reality.

I look back at my life and think that it’s enough for a couple of books. A couple of books with a complicated story, but a happy ending. Those that make you laugh and cry. Those that talk about complex things, but always in simple words. Those in which I almost died many times, but still survived. In which at the very end I sit on the seafront and squint at the sun. My beloved husband is about to come back with a cup of coffee and a paper bag. In a bag there are 6 churros covered with a layer of nutella. We drink coffee, eat the sugary sugar and watch as naked Norwegians jump into the fjord that has just thawed after winter. Somewhere on the other side of the city there is a house. Waiting for us to come back. A home that no one can take away.