34
5/23/2026
I dressed in the most expensive clothes I had ever worn. Through clenched teeth and a twisted ankle, I somehow managed to squeeze into those Cinderella shoes. For the sexiest birthday photo, I posed fresh out of the water, my face kissed by goggle marks, hair tangled, wearing the happiest smile. The fear never went away. From the first to the hundredth time, I’ll probably still be afraid, and yet I’ll keep descending deeper, as if searching for answers there, only to find that calming emptiness instead.
I wrote you a book. All of them . And I will continue, even the titles will be different- you will be between the lines. I promised I would love no one who doesn’t love you, and all year long I looked only at those whose lips tasted salty. No one understood me — not last year, and probably not in the years to come — why I need to run to you whenever it gets darkest or whenever a new beginning arrives. How, by being so terribly afraid of you, I stopped being afraid of life itself. A person really needs nothing more than that, I’d say, but short explanations only make people ask more questions.
Nothing has ever been easier than this past year. As if I had finally chased all the old ghosts out of every corner. Clean, light, and empty — like a beginning that starts every day only to lead into another beginning. But apparently that’s not allowed; apparently life can’t be that simple- my anxious brain kept searching for something to cling to, some tiny fly from which to inflate an entire national park. “Just breathe in and breathe out,” my favorite diver would repeat, as if preparing me for something I still wasn’t ready for this year.
I didn’t live through any love stories. To the disappointment of my readers/listeners and to my own unexpected joy. As if I had truly started believing the theory that a person only falls in love a few times in life, and I have only the last one left — and that’s why I raised the bar so high that even Jude Law remained merely an average man. Maybe it’s true that we only start searching when we feel something is missing. So if I no longer gift dramatic stories, you can blame only my laziness and such a gentle fate. And also the fact that almost all the men surrounding me this year were themselves very interested in men.
Every year on my birthday I would come up with dozens of reasons why life is beautiful. No matter how hard I tried today, all my thoughts were stolen by a fish a meter and a half long, sitting among the corals with thumb-sized eyes staring at me. Its mouth was blue. HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A FISH WITH A BLUE MOUTH?! And not just blue — turquoise! The sky itself is nowhere near as blue as that fish’s mouth. The instructor was trying with every possible sign to pull my attention away and get me to swim on, while I kept lagging behind, wildly waving my hands at him, trying to explain something that in my mind meant: THAT BLUE.
Maybe miracles still exist, I thought as I swam after the instructor. As long as not everything in life is terribly serious, there is still room for miracles. The kind we no longer believe in, but might one day finally be ready for.
And anyway, for my birthday I dedicate to myself a congratulatory concert piece. I’ve been humming it all year and it’s already starting to annoy everyone around me. Romantic. The kind of moment when the sun is setting and Agnė is staring at the ocean.
And there’s no need to search for anything anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py5wF0L7WSE
Cheeky one, I know. But you will love it too.