Break your lace, Tonya!

 On one day in 1994 I was watching figure ice skating championship, as I always used to do. It was a real feast to me, the day when it was coming, and I was looking forward to it long time before. I am certain about it, even though I cannot remember it very well. But that day, in 1994, I remember it clearly. There was a girl with a braid in a red dress, who suddenly stopped in the middle of the ice and started to cry. Her lace was broken. This is what I remember: her lamenting face, and the lesson- that no matter how far on top are you, your dreams can always fall into pieces.

 That image came back to me after more than twenty years. Only to discover, that I didn't know the real story behind it. The story of Tonya Harding.

 Let me tell you a story about two girls. One of them used to call another one a princess, but it was not a fairy tale they lived in. Despite that, a princess she said, with a cheeky grin on her face, but that's the way she was, another one used to answer with laughter. The way she was, spiky, distant, reserved you would say, but benevolent, as the other one always said, reliable and always standing out for her friends. The way she was, the other one liked it, even though she knew there was some 'old rivalry' between them, as she laughed, such a long time ago. But what she didn't know was that rivalry may pass away. While jealousy always remains. Because jealousy, you see, is way more dangerous than rivarly. Jealousy means you have something she never will.

 My mom always said we should be cheering for girls from former Soviet Union. A life of a girl from behind the Berlin Wall was nothing like of those on the west. It was not meant to be, that's the matter of history. But I was just a girl in front of TV, born on the wrong side of the world to be a princess. I admired American girls, girls like from the movies, girls born in Disneyland, with good names to conquer the world. The girl with the broken lace was called Tonya Harding. And she was the real American dream story, that story which was never meant to be mine.
 For years all I remembered from that moment was her braid, and a dress which I believed to be red. And her face, her face in tears when she realized that her lace was broken. Her American dream was broken.

 I cannot recall the circumstances when the crying face of Tonya Harding showed up in my mind once again. It was twenty years later, while I was charging my batteries at home during a break from realizing my own American dream, or rather a mere European-crisis version of it, with all the exhausting upside downs to be a part of it. Maybe it was her laughter when we've last seen each other, something like three months ago, and that look of her blue eyes when she said 'princess' once again.

Spookhall

 I have been seeing Spookhall for most of my life. Sometimes, if I get lost in my dream, I suddenly find myself in front of the entrance, and despite the immediate resentment I always end up in there. The Spookhall is not a place like any other. It is actually, a storage for an excess, an exceeding of utility, a gathering of objects imprisoning the sad fatality of material being. It is a storage, in fact, for medical and chemical goods, wastebags, washing liquids and first aid kits, cleaning towels and syntetic powders, hygiene products, sanitary pads, mops, brushes, buckets, shits, suffocating stocks of granola. It makes me feel sick. I want to grab the very first paper roll and stuff myself through my throat. Like I would do everything not to soak through mould of walls of the Spookhall, and what they are bearing for me in my nightmares. 

 There are always the same frosted windows with a blurry vision on disgusting plastic boxes filled with chemistry, and a clock which always stops at five. There is a sound coming from the inside, a monotone, overwhelming tune of a wind lost in a dark. In the town I grew up I heard once a sound like that, coming out of the old meat factory, bringing a choking smell of a slaughtered pig. This is how Spookhall is like.