Back in the Motherland - and what a rough landing it was.
I've had the interesting conversation about the term "Motherland" (Родина) with several people, Russian and non-Russian alike. What I always say about it, is that I am not Russian, and I have no motherland. The home of the brave, land of the free - she's not our mother. She is not old, mighty, wise. She does not embrace us in her wide, white bosom, enveloping us in the warmth of her hearth, the smell of freshly baked rye bread, and the scent of Siberian pine in her black hair.
No, America is not our mother. She is a girl - free, young, fiercely independent. Often foolish, certainly naive. She has a love of high, hard-to-reach places in the mountains; of wide, barren plains where the wind blows through your clothes; of forests painted entirely in shades of wild. Friend to all, lover of no one man, Lady Liberty knows her own mind and won't be led by the nose.
I miss her.
The story of my flight from Seattle to Paris, Paris to St Petersburg, is a great tale. Too long to tell it here and now, if I wished to do it justice. Suffice it to say for now that on the last leg of the flight, I was mistaken for a "spy" working for the CIA, that I met another American on the plane who was in fact employed by the CIA, and sat next to a woman from Los Angeles who is finishing her studies in St Petersburg and was herself looking to join the CIA in the future. What a flight.
I arrived at the St Petersburg airport, exhausted after almost 30 hours without sleeping, and rattled by the sudden plunge from bright, ethnically diverse Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, to grey, uniform Pulkovo. I met my taxi driver, and messaged my parents using the airport's wifi that I had done so and was heading home.
"One moment," the driver said, grinning at me sheepishly. His eyes pointed in opposite directions, I wasn't sure where to look, so I fixed upon his unibrow and said, "Yes? Is there a problem?" in my most sterile, trans-atlantic English, attempting to mask a ripple of fear. The last thing I needed was a complication. "Er, no, but please, you wait here one moment. I must visit the closet. Okay?". Blushing, he waddled off flat-footedly, perspiring slightly, as I stared after him in wonderment. Someone needs to tell the Russians here that nobody in real, English speaking countries calls the toilet a "water closet".
When I finally got to my building in the centre of the city, I tumbled out, and dragged my heavy bags up to my flat. The wi-fi was not working. The balance on my Russian SIM card was in negative figures, meaning no phone calls, no texts, no internet until I found an ATM that would take my debit card and top up the balance. I spent about an hour mindlessly unplugging and replugging all the cables connected to the router - nothing doing.
Panic would perhaps have come over me had I had the energy. Instead, I sat on my small, stained yellow sofa, and I cried. I cried for my parents, my two best friends that I was going to spend months without; for my brother, growing into a young man without me there; for the beautiful nature and lush forests of my beloved evergreen Washington that I'd abandoned; for the journey I had just embarked upon, and that for the first time I was unsure about. I felt that I was, for the first time, utterly alone. There was such a deep silence there, for that hour on the sofa.
Delirious with exhaustion, I angrily pulled myself together. Now was not the time to be a little girl, for shame! I made a quick stop at the local grocery store to get milk, eggs, and a jug of clean still water, then came home, showered, and went to bed.
The next day, I set out to put money on my phone. When I had finally succeeded, after four ATMs refusing my card, I began to get calls. My parents, it turns out, had been frantically attempting to get ahold of me for several hours. They had been on the point of calling the embassy, when they had finally reached me. I was on Nevsky Prospect, the largest avenue in St Petersburg, when their call came in, and I ducked into a side street hurriedly as we spoke. I felt a sense of paranoia, speaking English in public. I had been told not to, and while I never understood exactly why I shouldn't, I do notice I get open stares on the rare occasions I do. I stumbled into a side alley, and I began to explain what had happened and why I had been cut off from them.
The last they had heard, I had gotten into a car with the taxi driver, and gone off to G-d knows where. They had contacted the taxi company, and had been told that I had signed a form that said that I was picked up at the agreed upon location of the airport, but that that was all they knew, and they couldn't reach the driver to confirm anything else yet.
The more we spoke, the more tears came. All inhibition gone, I wept openly there in public, speaking English, not minding the stares of passersby, or the fact that their pace noticeably slowed when they reached me as they attempted to eavesdrop, casting surreptitious glances at me as they inched by, and then not-so-subtly speeding up when I caught their eye.
For those of you that know me personally, you know how I feel about tears in public. It doesn't happen.
I don't cry at weddings, funerals, or sad movies in theatres. I didn't cry when the family dog was euthanized, though I saw her death as the metaphorical final nail in the coffin of my childhood. I didn't cry this past August, saying goodbye to my uncle and his two children, after a wonderful dinner, during which I could sense the financial strain they were hiding behind their laughter out of a wish to assure I had a good time. I cry at home, after, in bed, when the lights are off, and everyone has gone to bed. Pain and mourning are private matters, and I have always felt I need to be strong by keeping them as such.
But there on the street, I sobbed that I missed home and wanted to leave, that I couldn't bear it another minute here, that this was all a mistake, and that it was all my fault for wanting to come in the first place. Because I fought to get here. Nobody thought I could make it, but I fought tooth and nail, and I worked with this goal in mind for two years, and I made it. I was, consequently, the only one to blame.
The last of the blue skies watched over me as I made my way to the conservatory each morning for the 9.30am ballet class. I found myself looking up at it through the clouds often.
In an odd way, I never feel so close to something as when I'm far away from it - my family, my country, all the familiar things. I think we're all like that.
A piece of what I longed for seemed to have lodged itself in my throat, creating a lump there that wouldn't be swallowed. But the sky helped, in a way, that persistent steely blue that I knew would never go away. Even when it's covered by clouds, it's still there, and none of us ever lose hope that we'll see it peeking out again sometime soon.
It comforts me to think that somewhere out there, the people I care for are living, breathing, going about their daily lives, under the very same sky. There's a sense of peace, of connection, that I feel when I think about it that way, when I remember that I'm not alone, that we have this few things in common. Same sky, same moon, same stars.
I go about my day, exploring this city of beauty and dreams, riddled by ruin and with little nightmares lurking in the dark corners. Each day, one foot in front of the other, class following class, rehearsal after rehearsal.
And just so, I'm learning to keep my balance.
Site of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin's final duel, which led to his death
