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reflections on belonging

a palmers chronicle right bw

Graphic Novels

The Italian sailors would sit out those forty days and pass the time onboard their ship, gazing out at what must have been the tantalizing site of land after so much time at sea. But time moved more slowly in centuries past. In our era of globalization, our sense of time has sped up to a dizzying blur. This enforced quarantine may just slow time for all of us.
I have resolved to write my quarantine diary for forty days. I will be like those sailors of times past. I will allow time to slow down for me and my diary shall be a place to reflect.

Photo by Loreta Margelė
For some reason, you think of St Denis of Paris who carried his own head, and, legend has it, walked around crying and kissing himself on the lips. Before the smartphone in your head shatters, you can ask yourself while it’s not too late: what do you hope to see when you look at yourself. To see, or to look. To live or to show how you live.

Photo by G. Kavoliūnas, 2017
In this world, there are many scissors that cut off living memory, that cut tradition and relation, that separate nations. However, on rare occasions we happen upon such small pairs of scissors that can manage to unlock the locks of disappeared worlds, of forgotten treasure troves, scissors that can open the road to a new life.

Photo by Vytautas Suslavičius
Did I want to be like my mother, like a woman? I wanted to be more like my father or Jonas, our carpenter neighbor, rather than a familiar feminine being. To me, gender identity was alterable. To be similar to only women seemed like a limitation or even an injustice.

Personal archive photo
Language no longer feeds the wordsmiths, so they are forced to pack up their belongings and take to the road. That is how Lithuania looks to me from a bird’s-eye view: hundreds of feral, hungry writers, their laptops, tablets and smartphones thrown on to wagons, departing in caravans for the West.

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