It’s different here. I mean, obviously it is — couldn’t be otherwise, right? The sky looks different — probably, the first thing you’ll ever notice. It gets a little green in the morning, giving you these precious moments when you can take gazillions of pictures to fiddle with later during the day pretending you still have access to your Instagram feed on your dying iPhone.
Unable to publish post, what the hell? It says: “No internet connection”, honey, how is that we do not have internet? Do you have the same issue with wifi? Seems like it keeps happening every morning. Or is it just me?
No, it’s just you. Just your two legs, two eyes, two quivering nostrils pulling in thick alien air as you leap through the wetlands under the heavy fog singing “All My Loving” and becoming excited about the fact that it still sounds the same as it did in your tiny L-shaped room back home.
Every time I sit on a cold wet stone on the edge of the silent rainforest that extends beyond my sight on this endless plateau, I entertain myself with the thought that I’m actually not even supposed to be here. Like, literally, it was a mistake, an accidental misplacement of matter, a natural phenomenon that resulted in me ending up here. I should’ve been watching cable TV in the early 90s and stuffing my face with sweets while my parents were out and about. I should’ve been marching shoulder to shoulder with my liberal friends during street protests in early 2010s Moscow and going into endless rants with random people on Facebook while political experts where skeptically shaking their heads. Instead of slouching on this cold piece of an ancient rock whose age I can’t even fathom because of the conceptual differences in measurement systems, I should’ve been sitting through the latest Marvel movie with my new girlfriend, reassuring myself with the thought of the following sex reward, at the same time meticulously trying to figure out whether it’s actually worth it.
I should’ve gone out more often. I should’ve been dancing in the middle of a big crowd, not in a stuffy single room. I shouldn’t have been the only person left in the building when something as rare as medium-scale wormhole emerged in San Francisco downtown and irreversibly took me out of the evolutionary process to put me in the other one, significantly ahead of time.
Jan Vaschuk 