Sparrow Heights

The snarling wildcats keep me up, so I sit shirtless on the balcony and sip on some gin.  Bombay Sapphire on the rocks, like I like, a bottle my girlfriend bought me.  The gauzy curtain softly billows in the oscillating fan, and the serpentine hiss of the broken toilet spills across the floor.  The marquees hang darkly beneath lights shining like bright orange pumpkins, and the letters on the signs still don’t look familiar.  It’s Moscow in June, and I’m halfway here at a place in a moment that no longer feels like earth in the present, now.

My birthday was on Tuesday.  My roommate bought me a cake–shockingly good, with something like Cool Whip for frosting and several different layers, both chocolate and white–and my girlfriend’s roommate barbequed me some fatty pork ribs and baked a cherry pie.  A twenty-six year old died in my Metro station, and he laid in a pool of his lukewarm, cherry-filling blood on the platform for two hours.  I don’t really know what that means, but I know that I spend too much time thinking about it.  Twenty-six is too young for importance, too old for caprice.  I saw a man outside the discount store in a black jacket that said "Fucker’s Club" in big white letters above the sihlouette of several naked women.  I smiled grimly, if only for the word’s many definitions.

Shadows on the corner hide the hutch where I bought flowers some weeks before; they conned me.  Not able to argue, I took my "four" stalks of lilies–two with blooms, one utterly shorn of them–and silently vowed never to return to them.  I must walk by it regularly, however, and the middle-aged ladies in their glass coop glower at me, and I stare daggers back at them.  I buy flowers down the street, now, and as I walk by their little shack I hold them proudly in front of me: noble?  No, but exquisitely satisfying.

I’m still at Sparrow Heights, a place where the entirety of Moscow spreads out like a worn tablecloth.  The Gothic spires of Moscow State University spiral upward at a blue too blue; the river unwinds like a spool of brown yarn through the city. Wild dogs fight over scraps of gyro meat.  Birds I don’t recognize tweet and twitter from the branches of trees I don’t recognize that curl and uncurl.  This place is insane, and I don’t know if the heavy, smoggy will push me down into a mucky puddle on a cobbled street.  If you’re always crawling to keep from falling, all you’ll ever see is your hands.  I stand on my tippy-toes and my eyes strain at the skyscrapers.

There are year-round flower stands everywhere, but now that a more verdant season has arrived, they no longer stick out like sore (green) thumbs.  The cottonwood trees have released their flimsy catkins, and they gather in piles along the shallow troughs that line the sidewalks, and the curbs that trace the residential streets.  In related news: I can’t breathe through my nose.  At all.  I am constantly subjected to that uncomfortable feeling that something impressively large and exceedingly grotesque is hanging from the bottom of my nose.  Are my students staring at me because my lessons are interesting, or because they don’t know how a two pound booger came out of a one pound nose?  When they start to scream or faint, then I’ll know.  Then I’ll know.

It’s cool on the balcony, too cool, and my the hair on my chest begins to bristle and my ears begin to ache.  The water in my gin is still ice, and the words on my fingers are still thoughts in my mind.  I put two feet in front of the others and crawl into bed.