Lament of Dying Love to Motherland (country, people, work, culture)

[BusyMeAK]

It hurts. You know, ithurts, when after swinging from love to contempt to hatred back to love, pity, despair, bewilderment, and to disparagement again, you suddenly, against your will, against all your experience, all reasoning, find that under the thick ash, there still is a small, but stubbornly warm pile of burning embers: your – presumably – well buried love to your motherland. Astounded, you swipe the ashes off, and let the flames grow again, and your child, raised in the foreign country, somehow picks this strange love from you, and cherishes it, and becomes proud of her ancestors and culture left far away, on the other side of three oceans at once. You are a bit scared because you know what your motherland is, but it’s always good to come home, see friends, walk streets of the beautiful, ancient, mysterious, enigmatic, multilayered city with a toy-like, unique castle looking as heart with Vosdvizhenka, Mokhovaya,Borovitskaya, and Vasilievskiy Spusk as veins and arteries, working as heart, sucking in, spitting out people, fear, orders, money… You let it happen, even though “don’t trust, don’t fear, do not beg” was you motto for last three decades. And inevitably, you get your punishment. You know you earned it. You had to kill these embers as soon as you saw them. You should have been cool, and let past remain past, but you failed. So don’t complain now, when your motherland, an old ugly obese who?re, kills her harmless neighbor whose guilt was so small – just a wish for self-respect. You should have disowned her long ago, to save yourself from this feeling of devastating shame. If you did, you could at least say “they killed.” You did not, and now you have to say “we did it.” The worst thing is, this is the truth. We did it, we who still live where we were born, and we who left in search of comfort, freedoms, money, self-realization, or fun. We all did it because we used to swallow our puke when beaten, wax our own ropes when hanged, and spread the legs when raped. We, bearers of the great culture, children of those who saved the world 70 years ago, we failed to remember the mantra that our stupid teachers, not knowing how important their work was, tried to install in our minds: “Human – it sounds proudly!” We forgot it, chasing happiness, wealth, power. The problem is, some things are not to be forgotten. There are lines not to be crossed. “Those heading there are mad, and those who reached it, suffer. Now you do know why my heart doesn’t beat under your palm.” “Our” heart doesn’t beat anymore because “we” has dissociated. But why it still aches?