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reflections on belonging

a palmers chronicle right bw

Graphic Novels

Photo by Laima Stasiulionytė
so long as our partying ended with nothing more than frenching and cuddling in bed together, everything was cool. but when all three of us started having sex – together, and separately – well, povky more or less made love to laura, but when i started to do that too, everything changed.

Photo by Dalia Mikonytė
Water is the most hypocritical of all, it can even rise again after it has subsided. Water is an actor and illusionist who always hides a trump card in his jacket sleeve.

Photo by Lamų Slėnis
For some reason, when a person dies, everyone suddenly forgets that he was an old pervert we all tried to stay away from. Or a jackass that was always prattling on. If a second-generation radicalised Afghan immigrant shoots you dead at an LGBT club in Miami, the road to media heaven clears up for you.

Photo by Regimantas Tamošaitis
And you don't need to understand anything. You’re only a branch, shaking with the whole tree. It’s a special wind, and from this day on you’ll always recognise it: it blows when a loved one is taken from you, and a hole appears in their place, a terrible hole for terrible winds.

Photo by Dainius Dirgėla
… Unfortunately, it’s happened more than once that the thing, the place or the person I desired, once I had experienced them, did not give me the awaited and hoped for joy. Instead of taking on clear contours, as when, after putting on one’s glasses, the image on the monitor comes into focus, they went on living not in one form but two. Moreover, the primary fruit of fantasy prevailed, becoming more real than the real one.

Photo by Adelina Kunčiūtė
The princess knew little about Lithuania, often confused it with Estonia, and was convinced that the capital of Lithuania was Riga. She once saw a CNN documentary, and fell in love with the land at once. She liked the Lithuanian people, their determined look, their lips firmly pressed together, and their big political rallies, and they carried flags in the streets. She had not seen anything so exotic in wildest Africa, or in the South American jungle, or among the Maori of New Zealand...

Photo by Benediktas Januševičius
'Loneliness,' Gabr said. 'Excruciating loneliness, horrifying longing. Against my will, a wave rises in me: distant space invades me. I become as though alien to everybody and to myself. And then… the sound penetrates me, weakly. I am entirely focused on the other, I cannot do anything.'

Photo by manipuliacija.lt
Most of us went back home. No coaches. They were pedalin’ their VW Golfs. We had our cigs, what was left of ‘em, which we sold to truck drivers at petrol stations. So we came home happy, and bad ass, way more bad ass than before. I mean, neon lights shined for us, whores took us by the hand. And we were all wearing t-shirts that said HANOVER RUGBY.

Photo by Milda Juknevičiūtė
I’ve ascended into my third decade, and people say to me, “These are your golden years.” Tonight, I’m stuck in Aéroport Paris Beauvais Tillé. The airport closes for the night. My next flight is in twenty hours. It’s a hundred kilometers to Paris. I have no money and no place to stay. It’s winter. I spend the night wandering through the closest town. “Your golden years,” I repeat to myself as I curl up in a McDonald’s tunnel slide for children so as not to freeze. “Your golden years.” I whisper these words into my own ears as I pull a half-eaten sandwich out of the trash bin.

Photo by Joana Buivydaitė. First published in "Lamų slėnis" magazine.
This is the future in action. Something you don’t yet recognise, which begins to live through you. When I think about these things, I’m overcome by such a longing, such grief almost.

Antanas Garšva wrote. A calm inevitability flowed back into his unconscious. The nightingale fell silent. Above the fence it brightened. In the nightingale’s song, in himself, Garšva was searching for a lost world. Just as this modest bird had sung a thousand years ago. Its song a cipher, the first communicated code.

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