1. The fog, first.
2. The way the bus from Pulkovo Airport pierced the heavy veil as we were taken to the dormitories.
3. How, on that drive my first night, there was darkness and density all around. I never could quite see through.
4. How it was 2018 and winter when I arrived. That was important.
5. Going to shower in the dormitory, and my nose beginning to bleed profusely.
6. My phone breaking because of the steam in the unventilated bathroom. (I’d left it atop the sink.)
7. How the blood and the broken phone seemed like bad omens.
8. Insisting to myself that there was no such thing as omens.
9. Being twenty, and deciding that my age granted me some kind of invincibility or insight into the world that had been inaccessible to me in my teenage years. And realizing that I would never be impervious to the world, that insights were often gotten through mistakes and that I would be making them up until my death.
10. Moving out of the dormitory to live with Vera, a Russian woman in her late-fifties.
11. Never hearing about Vera’s husband, but surely there had been one. There was a son, grown up. He visited once.
12. How, during the first meal I ate with Vera, she very warmly and insistently offered me ketchup.
13. It was a brand new bottle and she proffered it to me like a bottle of wine at a house-warming party.
14. Wondering if ketchup was associated with some kind of American stereotype.
15. Taking the ketchup and squirting it generously onto the chicken she cooked despite never having particularly liked ketchup.
16. The peculiar green that the hallways of Vera’s apartment building were painted.
17. The same green all over the walls of the university.
18. The way Vera’s apartment building, which likely dated back to the Khrushchev era, looked from the outside as if it would crumble at any moment.
19. How the hallways sometimes smelled of cat piss, but how, once you opened the door to her apartment, you were in a very decent space.
20. Vera telling me once, over tea: “God laughs at our plans,” and how the tired truism seemed more true than if I’d heard it in English.
21. Realizing she could say any cliche and through the language barrier, it would suddenly come to me as a sparkling, fresh, original idea.
22. Going to the Hermitage Museum once, and promising myself I would go again and again and again — maybe once a week for the entirety of my time there.
23. Walking past the vast building nearly every day, but never again going inside to walk through its immense collection.
24. Walking in my parka down Nevsky Prospect. My hood pulled up and my head down to keep from the biting wind.
25. Getting to know Petersburg by its sidewalks, upon which my eyes were often fixed.
26. The forever-long ride down the escalators to reach the metro.
27. Seeing people kiss and embrace on metro platforms while I awaited the train.
28. Seeing more people kiss and embrace on metro platforms through the windows of trains I was on as they left the station. The sense that the couples were completely alone on an island that was the metro platform.
29. Meeting another Jewish girl from America and deciding together that we would attend a Passover dinner at a synagogue she learned about online.
30. When Passover did come, wandering the streets with her, our maps pulled up, and never finding any sign of a synagogue at all.
31. The question of whether the synagogue even existed.
32. The intrusion of men into my life in a sudden and unignorable way.
33. The feeling that I now understood what it meant to live in a fully patriarchal society.
34. But also the truth: that I had always lived under patriarchy in the U.S., but patriarchy of a more subtle form.
35. The realization that patriarchy was not something one could make disappear completely, but could only lessen by degrees.
36. Thinking of the city as a city of writers and therefore thinking that just by the nature of my being there, I was more a writer than I’d ever been.
37. The ice. All around.
38. Telling myself that I could make it through the whole four months in Petersburg without once slipping on the ice and falling on my ass.
39. Eventually, inevitably, falling on my ass.
40. Watching the news with my host mom — a political analysis show. Her saying that politics were a “tsirk.” Momentarily thinking she meant church (“tserkov’”) before realizing she really did mean “tsirk.” A circus.
41. Saying, “Oh yes, It’s like that for us, too.”
42. Wanting to talk to everyone because speaking Russian was practice.
43. Reading every billboard and sign I passed on my walks like I had when I was a kid and had just learned to read English.
44. My mom telling me, before I left for Petersburg, that if anything got bad I could come home.
45. Feeling that to leave Petersburg early would be a failure.
46. Also feeling immensely comforted by my mom’s words and yet embarrassed that I still needed my mom to tell me I could come home, as if I were a child at a sleepover, not a young adult in Russia.
47. Being in a long-distance relationship with my girlfriend at the time, Y.
48. How we’d opened the relationship before I left for Russia.
49. How I called her on the phone in the mornings when our times lined up.
50. The ache of longing. How tangible it was.
51. How we both cried often on the phone.
52. The horrible act of crying on the phone. Reaching out across space and wanting to be held.
53. How Y, a textiles student, had made me a leather journal case to take with me. I’d filled it with several moleskin journals and kept a print she’d made in one of the case’s pockets. The print was on a white cloth. It was an image of two stick figures with long, flowing, stick-hair holding hands. The material was so comforting, I often took it out and rubbed it between my fingers.
54. That sight, in particular, stands out: seeing trash cans on the side of the road billowing with smoke from a still-burning cigarette tossed idly in.
55. The long list of museums I had written down before I ever got to the city.
56. The long list of dreams I never dared write down about what it might be like to be in Petersburg.
57. Dreams like: walking around the city alone and writing incredibly moving poems about solitude and urbanity.
58. Dreams like: meeting writers and intellectuals at cafes and having long conversations in Russian about books and art with them.
59. The realization that I wasn’t a skilled writer yet and that I much preferred walking with someone to walking alone.
60. The realization that I was not ready to conduct long conversations about books and art in Russian.
61. The realization that I was able to speak Russian, but that I was far from ready to converse.
62. Then: the disappointment in the distance between a goal and its attainment.
63. My Russian culture professor putting a picture of an oligarch in one of his powerpoints and asking the class: “What race is he?”
64. How, when no one answered, he said, “He’s a Jew. You can tell by his eyes.”
65. How, though I’d never thought of it, I momentarily wondered if there was such a thing as Jewish eyes.
66. How I kept looking at mine in the mirror and wondering if I’d inherited them.
67. The same professor saying that the problem with America is that no one stands by their man.
68. How he criticized the Me Too movement as being indicative of a fundamental problem of American society (i.e., women don’t stand by their men/abusers).
69. How he claimed that Russia would never have such a problem because women knew how to stand by their men.
70. How when he said these things, I looked around at the faces of the other Americans in class and saw either indifference or quiet shock.
71. How I felt I needed to say something, but also felt the need to be silent.
72. Wondering if my rage at his words was not also indicative of my Americanness.
73. Having the thought: “Oh, this is how a woman can begin to hate herself for being such.”
74. Getting red in the face.
75. When walking through the city, a sense of history and its immediacy.
76. Seeing the sculpture of The Bronze Horseman—Peter the Great’s figure balanced atop a bucking stallion—and picturing, as if it were actually layered over the sculpture, the words of Pushkin’s poem of the same name.
77. The cold.
78. Tea with Vera.
79. Going on a date with a Russian girl I’d met on an app and being very afraid that instead of the girl, a whole squad of Russian police would arrive and tell me I was under arrest.
80. The awkwardness of going on a date in a language you do not speak very well.
81. Liking the girl, but realizing I had used all my vocabulary and had nothing left to say. Rather, I had plenty more to say, but no words to say it.
82. Walking to university early one morning and coming upon a man holding a bottle in a brown paper bag. How he made eye contact with me before blowing a snot rocket onto the dirtied snow.
83. The cold.
84. Writing little poems in my moleskin notebooks next to ever- expanding lists of Russian words I needed to define.
85. More tea with Vera.
86. Wondering if everything seemed so foreign because it was, indeed, foreign. Or if everything seemed so foreign because I had never before lived in a city that big.
87. Deciding that everything seemed so foreign because: both.
88. Vera coming back to her apartment from a gallery opening. How alive she was with excitement as she explained that it was an exhibit of smells. You could walk around the gallery and each scent was supposed to evoke a different place in Petersburg. “You’d smell something and would be transported to the train station, then smell another and be moved to the gardens.”
89. How I wanted to go to the gallery of smells, but knew the scents would evoke nothing for me, for this was not my city.
90. Telling Vera that many Americans believed that Russia had interfered with the 2016 American elections. Her saying that it wasn’t possible.
91. Asking: “Why?”
92. Her replying, “Because we are not good at computers.”
93. The sense that everyone was being lied to by their governments. Myself included. That truth was just whatever everyone was told to believe.
94. Going on a different date with a girl who worked as a tour guide. Getting a free tour of the city. Asking her if she ever made up fake stories when leading a tour. Her saying, “Yes. Once.” She’d taken a tour group to one of the tsar’s palaces. When they’d walked about the grounds they came upon a statue she had never seen. One of the tourists asked her who it was and she lied, without hesitation: “An important general.”
95. Wondering if any tour guides had lied to me.
96. Wondering if the whole story about telling a lie to the tour group was itself a fabrication.
97. The long nights of drinking.
98. The short nights of drinking.
99. The way it was so hard to get from the city center to the outskirts where I lived with Vera. And how it seemed at some point, late in the night, that it was just easier to keep drinking until morning when the metros would open back up.
100. A man or two asleep outside in a pile of snow in the street cradling a bottle of alcohol.
101. My mom telling me over the phone that she worried I was “losing myself over there.”
102. More tea with Vera.
103. Walking across the frozen Neva.
104. The American boy, Ethan, who lived with another Russian lady in the same apartment block as I did.
105. How we would commute to school together.
106. How we would come home from the bars together.
107. How in this way, we began to get to know one another.
108. How he told me once, when we were both drunk walking back from the metro, that his father cheated on his mom “many times” and how he would probably cheat on his girlfriend, too. How he said it like there was no other course of action. Also, how he told me very proudly during the same conversation that he had a bigger penis than his twin brother.
109. How I told him that I thought cheating was morally repugnant, and how, when he did propose something between us, I told him I was not interested.
110. How he did cheat on his girlfriend eventually.
111. How he did so with me.
112. How I was too drunk to remember the extent to which he (we) had done it.
113. How I looked up pictures of Ethan’s girlfriend on Facebook the next day and wanted to tell her what I thought had happened, not to ruin her relationship, but to let her know who she was dating.
114. But also, maybe, to exonerate myself. To let my guilt be known.
115. The feeling of having sinned unforgivably, even though I was not someone who believed in sin.
116. How, the day after whatever had happened, happened, I went to an organ concert.
117. How the organ sounded in the dark room and everyone closed their eyes and just listened to the music that seemed to fill the space as if it were a physical thing and not just vibrations of sound.
118. How Ethan and I never commuted to university together anymore.
119. How Ethan and I very much avoided each other after all that.
120. How like a woman I felt. I had never really felt like a woman before all that.
121. Realizing that being a woman was just being made to feel so by a man.
122. The cold again, more sharply.
123. How Vera told me whenever I came back at seven in the morning from a long night of drinking, that I did not have to do that.
124. How she hadn’t said it in a chastising manner, but in a way that implied she had expected better of me.
125. How I expected better of myself, but felt pulled into the city center by the belief that that was where things might happen.
126. How at some point, I decided I would just prefer to sit in my room and look out the window and read.
127. Leaving for Berlin for a university break to spend time with an old friend who was studying in Leipzig.
128. The way that, as I stepped off the plane in Germany, it felt like I was stepping out of a fog that hadn’t really lifted from me since I’d arrived in Petersburg.
129. How alive Berlin was.
130. How open and uninhibited.
131. Spending the week with my friend and Y who’d flown to meet me.
132. Going to queer bars and feeling that openness.
133. Drinking too much and falling asleep at a hip bar. The embarrassment, the shame, but mostly the bliss of falling asleep.
134. Saying goodbye to Y again. Returning to distance. Returning to Petersburg.
135. Almost immediately upon my return: the irrepressible sense of repression everywhere. Without a source. Or perhaps, the source was me. My queerness out of place and repressing itself.
136. Watching the music video for Janelle Monae’s song “Make Me Feel” which had been released in February of that year. The force of that song. The unapologetic sensuality and joy.
137. Watching Monae dance between a man and a woman singing, “It’s like I’m powerful with a little bit of tender.”
138. Watching it again.
139. And again.
140. And one more time for good measure.
141. Hooking up with a man from Mexico who I met at an international party.
142. Him speaking less Russian than me and me speaking only the rudimentary Spanish of American elementary schoolers so that what words passed between us were monosyllabic and had more to do with our bodies’ movements.
143. The cramped space of the bottom bunk in his shared dorm room. The way he tried to motion for me to change positions. A sort of sexual sign language. Then, at last, him saying: “Doggy! Doggy!”
144. Realizing that the only English he spoke had come from pornography.
145. Watching the Russian news. Seeing footage of what the screen called: “American bombing of Syria.” Realizing I had no idea America had any involvement in Syria at that time.
146. Thinking, initially, that it was Russian anti-American propaganda.
147. Then, thinking it was true. America’s violence so prevalent and extensive that at any point in time it might be sending missiles into apartment buildings in cities the world over.
148. Out my window at Vera’s apartment, I could see another set of apartment buildings not far off. On their sides, stripes of red, orange, and yellow were painted as if someone thought they could trick people into believing it was a real sunset.
149. Sitting and staring at that artificial sunset many evenings when I’d finished my Russian exercises.
150. Ethan hearing I had slept with the man from Mexico and telling me I should get tested.
151. The realization that everyone knew that I had slept with the man, and that I had slept with another man, too. Almost seeing a shift in the yes of the men I knew when they looked at me.
152. The feeling, acute, that I was a slut and/or “easy.”
153. The sense that this made me dirty somehow.
154. The strangeness of this feeling since I had never before felt it when sleeping with women.
155. Understanding that there was a difference between sleeping with men and sleeping with women, but that the difference had more to do with expectations and unspoken, but widely understood, rules than with the actual act.
156. Shame and the insistent desire for the cold and fog to lift—please God—lift.
157. Missing the horizon. I mean, missing a horizon that didn’t end with a view of buildings.
158. Talking about the movie, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, with Vera who inquired as to why the film depicted racism when “America wasn’t racist.”
159. Me explaining that it was, in fact, still quite racist.
160. Her replying that we “had a black president” and therefore this was impossible.
161. Wondering how to explain anti-blackness in a language I didn’t speak in a context as racially homogenous as Petersburg.
162. Reading Call Me By Your Name with Y and talking about it on the phone.
163. How good it felt to read something gay.
164. Spring, at last.
165. The city, gorgeous in the coming light.
166. How all the books I read and the lectures I’d attended told me that Petersburg was a “city of facades.”
167. Understanding “facade” as referencing a physical thing and a symbol of falsity.
168. How, when all the snow and ice finally melted, people came outside and swept the sidewalks and streets of a minefield of cigarette butts and trash buried under the ice.
169. The warmth as a thing I loved all the more for its long absence.
170. Taking down my hood and feeling I could at last see the world around me.
171. Realizing I really had been living under a fog.
172. Going to Nabokov’s childhood-apartment-turned-museum. Seeing framed butterflies and samizdat.
173. Going to Anna Akhmatova’s apartment.
174. Going to Dostoevsky’s apartment.
175. The way writers’ museums turn out to be so boring. It’s their words, after all, that interest us.
176. Seeing a man grab a woman tightly in the street and, after hearing her scream, beginning to say, “Stop!” before an American man pulled me back and said, “It is not your place.”
177. When I was getting ready to leave Petersburg, hoping I’d never go back, and wondering all the while, when was the earliest I could return.
178. How, near the end of my time there, Vera took me to the apartment of a friend of hers — a writer who had traveled in South America.
179. The apartment was in the center of Petersburg. Very bohemian. All the people were in their late 50s or 60s and had about them a learned and mystical air.
180. There was a man there who split his time between Paris and Petersburg.
181. Thinking that this was the very height of cool.
182. Trying very hard to follow the conversation.
183. Finding a string of the conversation and following it as far as I could, then my mind growing tired.
184. The man walking out with Vera and me after the party was done.
185. Realizing the man was very interested in Vera and likely wanted to meet with her again.
186. Feeling I was impeding his attempts to woo Vera.
187. At last, him splitting off from us.
188. Broaching the subject with Vera: “He seemed very interesting.”
189. Her replying: “He is someone who is always searching.”
190. How it scared me when she said that, because I knew that I was also someone who was searching. I wasn’t sure how to stop, but I knew that I must because it seemed clear now that I wouldn’t want to end up like him.
191. Wondering how I wanted to end up, anyway.
192. The days growing longer and longer.
193. The sun climbing into my bed with me at four in the morning.
194. Vera asking me what I wanted to do with my life once I’d finished school.
195. Me answering not with concrete plans but with a description of all the facts I knew about the life of Susan Sontag, who I very much admired.
196. Vera shaking her head no.
197. Vera telling me, “But that is her. What do you want to do?”
198. How, when she hugged me goodbye for the last time, Vera told me to promise to come back.
199. I promised.
200. I did not go back.