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After fifteen hours on Polish roads, I am finally home (if you think mentioning roads is boring, you’ve obviously never seen Polish roads). They say “home is where your heart is”, but I am pretty sure my heart is somewhere between the lungs, enclosed in the pericardium or whatever they call it. So I get confused.

My country welcomes me by giving this long forgotten allergy to absinthium right after we cross some symbolic booth, which would be called a border control post if it was last summer. Thanks to Mr Schengen, my passport can stay in the trunk together with the material for unfinished essays.

It’s six in the morning and you can easily tell that the guy in ‘Lukoil’ gas station does not get bonus depending on how nice he is to customers. He takes money through a little window and explains that the toilet is in the forest. I’m happy I’m not a tourist from abroad and I will not have to keep this story on my mind before I spill it on international travel blogs.

It’s foggy and it looks like cows are sleeping on big puffy clouds. It’s only now that one realizes that orange sun in many paintings isn’t just a kitschy trick of landscape painters.

I keep looking at the pictures that Frau Fritsche normally gives to those who leave the building, and I try to keep cool. All of these slogan-type of truths keep running through my mind. You’ll come next year. I’ll come next year. The world has become very small. I’ll send you pictures. I’ll write letters. I’ll be friends with you on facebook. On LinkedIn. And not only those and Myspace. I will follow you on Twitter. I will want to be your friend on Pounce. I will be your buddy on Flickr and I will want to subscribe to your channel on YouTube. It’s easy these days, you’ll see…

I don’t want universal truths anymore. I want my truths. I want you to keep singing arias from American musicals to me everyday. I want you to call me at 2 a.m. and tell me a story about the professor who stayed in the room with broken radiators when it was -10 outside, and refused to leave because of certain affinity with the student from his native country. I want you to keep trying to prove me that ‘some’ implies one or more even though now I know that it really does (literal translation of ‘some’ into Lithuanian prevented me from believing in it before). I want you to make chicken curry and tell me about your dream in which a chicken almost pecked a hole in your head. I want you to have coffee with me every Sunday. Go far a walk to the park of Schloss Charlottenburg, where ladies do pirouettes when smiling for cameras (influence of the Schloss?). I want you to have two ‘Cosmopolitans’ instead of one with me in ‘Zeitlos’ and go see Tenesee Williams at the English Theatre afterwards. I want you to shout ‘Enemy’ every time I bump into you in the corridor. I want you to laugh with me at ‘banausentum’. I want you to run through the forest with Turks to see the game on a big screen at Siegesäule after gates had been closed. I want you to help me create headlines for the website. I want to take a picture of you being interviewed by ‘RTL’. I want you to dance with a chicken again. I want to invent songs with you. I want to have tea with you every night before going to bed. I want to kiss on the roof…

And they say it’s always easier for those who leave rather than those who stay. Ironic. Like r-a-a-a-in on a wedding day. It’s like seeing signs of restaurants every two kilometers after you hadn’t been able to hold your hunger and eaten at McDonald’s. It’s like going to Wrocław and finding out that it’s more German than most cities of Germany itself (especially Berlin). It’s like a woman from the house administration who becomes nicer to you after she feels the smell of ‘Domestos’ coming from your bathroom but then sees dust on the coffee machine…

There’s a big hammock hanging in the apple trees. There’s Murakami, waiting to be read. There are cold empty churches that you can sneak into when the sun becomes too intense. There are friends who want long talks and canoeing…

I want to tell them I can’t, not yet, my heart is still not here, but then I remember it is actually in the pericardium, between the lungs, and I am pretty sure my biology teacher from primary school would confirm that. I only need somebody to confirm that as long as my heart is there in between the lungs or some other inner organs, it travels everywhere with me.

Vanity Fair

The last time I experienced ”uncomfortable silence” was three years ago. Somebody had been talking to me for three minutes with this low scary voice before I realized it was a guy from my primary school. I had never really spoken to him before, apart from pulling each other’s hair or taking part in these water wars between boys and girls in grade 3. Plus his voice hadn’t gone through mutation at that time so there was no way I could actually recognize it now.

We talked about some of the classmates from the primary school but eventually realized we only remembered the names of like seven of them, let alone last names. After we had gone through “the list”, I stopped talking for a bit and tried to decide which bus to take next. My classmate decided to deal with the “uncomfortable silence” and said:

“My hamster was ill last week.”

I didn’t know whether I was supposed to be sad about the illnesss, or happy that he actually had a hamster. That he loves nature, animals and is this “normal person”, who will eventually live in this neighbourhood where children build sand castles in the yard and dads say “Hello honey” to their moms when they get back from work.

I felt similarly confused about what to say everytime I would go to ‘Safeway’ in Portland and have all of the cashiers comment on my purchases and talk about their lives for hours as if they suspected I was a secret shopper and they needed to be extra nice to me. I got rid of the idea of being taken for a secret shopper though after this one cashier girl shitted about her boss for like ten minutes. I didn’t say anything and I didn’t make the “list of scenarios of how I could have responded” ever after.

Then, of course, a few instances in elevators, when you have to say “hello” after a person enters and then have to deal with a few minutes silence, performing some stupid reflex actions like looking at the mirror or checking your phone (which you had just switched off), before you can finally say ‘Tschüss’.

And then yesterday. Somebody stopped me in the street close to the house I now live in and asked if I knew where some pizzeria was. I didn’t. But instead of admitting that, I looked at the person, started pointing at all four directions and said: “Maybe there, there or there.”

He looked at me trying to hold the laughter and I felt it was about the right time to tell him something about hamsters.

There were no hamsters but, before I managed to say anything else, I saw this Berliner bear who had painted his every second tooth brown, so he could look even more scary laughing at me next time I am in a situation like that.