When birthdays begin in your life, the numbers of which you are no longer interested in voicing, a mountain of the past forms behind.
Lovely and cluttered apartments - parental and rented, alone and together, in the best districts and in strange places - from where you once left, taking out the last things, and you will never return.
Native and foreign lands, with all their fields and rivers, pubs and diners, Atlantic oceans and houses with platbands, where you would so much like to return, but there are many of them, and you are alone, like a Soviet saleswoman.
Close friends and distant, but good friends, with whom - very rarely - they did not share a woman, a job, or - very often - they did not share a neighboring country and progressive values, and more often they simply dispersed, gradually and completely lost, and more already do not drink, do not call, do not hug.
Tender and mischievous girlfriends who, as Joseph Brodsky would say, “died or married,” and are unlikely to ever write what they wrote, whisper what they whispered, look the way they looked.
Memories, nonsense, bad photos, torn tickets, someone's earrings, broken phones, unnecessary books that are a pity to throw away, documents left over from those you still love, tangled wires and shabby notes: “Mitya! I'll be there at eight. Refrigerated salad. Don't forget to pay for the internet!"
And what to do with it?
No, I'm not talking about the mountain of the past. What to do with the past is clear. Be in love.
What to do next? How to live?
In my favorite English TV series Any Human Heart, one aristocratic heroine - though she didn't mean age, but something more significant - answered this question like this.
- An invitation that cannot be rejected must be accepted.
Source: Dmitry Olshansky's blog