Pink Ochre Magazine

            No one in my family speaks English but me.

            Nobody in my family also writes but I do.

            I started writing approximately at the same time as I started learning English. Think I was around five. I was writing diaries and stories and I did it on any surface that I could find. Pages and pages were covered with curvy letters of different colors. My grandma, who I lived with at the time, opened all of my notebooks up and read what I held written. 

           When she read my journals

           it felt like a violation

         even though I didn't write anything that could truly upset her, I think. Not then, at least, not yet. She wasn’t subtle about that intrusion so I found out pretty quickly. And I wasn’t the only one who drew her attention – she also went through my parents’ stuff – though they didn't have anything interesting written. I was the least dull for her. Maybe that way she sought control. I don’t know, I never asked her about it. The flat we were living in was terribly small and overcrowded so there really was no way for me to escape her gaze and her hands that were touching everything that I touched, seeking information about the child she never really wanted in her life but who appeared anyway. Maybe she just wanted to know why it had to exist in the first place, that weird small thing at her home, who sometimes said the words in the language she didn’t understand. “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall”. 

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        My grandma “catching” me, even though there was nothing really to catch, felt like a risk, like a real danger. So, I started restricting myself.  I couldn’t write what I wanted about who I wanted – that’s fine. That’s just another rule that I had to follow. Don’t write what you think. Don’t go out after 8 p.m. Don’t look at girls that way. But there were still words left I could write down. Old MacDonald had a farm. Did my grandma even love me, I wonder? I know others think she did – that she does still. But I wonder sometimes if she is even capable of love. And I don’t mean that as an insult but as a genuine question. Because I don't think I am

          maybe because I was not permitted to

          but really, who knows why. I’m not sure that matters at all.

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         By the time I reached puberty no one in my family spoke English still – but I did it pretty fluently. At that time, I found a way to write without getting policed. Bliss. Finally, I could be myself – but what “self” was there? What was there to write about? When there was no me without those rules and those eyes. It really was easier to think of myself as if about another, hypothetical, imaginary being. It works still. When I am sitting in an overcrowded bus that is not much smaller than the flat I grew up in, I open up a book by James Baldwin or Oscar Wilde or anybody – any other body – and I’m not there. And I can leave. For a long time, the main criteria for picking up a book was that it wasn’t in my mother-tongue – that it is not the same language that I used to hear when my grandma turned the TV on or when I was told those things. “There are no such people in this country”. 

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           If I could really, truly leave, believe me, I already would.

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          I open up a book. I click on a YouTube video. I turn the music on. I keep running but I'm still here, here, here, there. One day my mother tongue may start feeling like home but now it only feels like a threat. 

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           ‘Would you mind me reading something from you?’ my mother asks.

           ‘Well, it's in English.’

           ‘Can you write something in Russian?’ she asks then, half-jokingly – disappointed.

            I will, but I won't tell.

           My grandma doesn’t ask. She doesn’t know I am writing still. She doesn’t know I am gay either – only my mother kind of knows but we never really talk about it. That’s how I learned to never talk about it at all – but in English, the language that they do not understand. 

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          By the time I could be considered a young adult, another problem appeared. Now one could be prosecuted for their word. It wasn’t just my grandma’s eyes anymore. The thing has become larger and vaster and ubiquitous. It has become a real risk, an actual danger. “The risks are real even if the choices do not exist” I read in one of James Baldwin’s books that went through on the bus. I saw people losing their freedom for the exact same things that I did. There was no choice but to learn to restrain myself again. Don’t speak about it in public. Don’t post this. Don’t forget to add “LGBT-movement is pronounced extremist and terrorist on the territory of Russian Federation”. It’s not something you can live with, not really. But there is still this illusion that if it's not my language then I cannot be prosecuted for the words I say – which is not true, which is so utterly false, yet it still feels like a veil. 

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             With my grandma, we don’t talk at all. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.

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          There is some damage that cannot be undone. There is something good that cannot be undone either. In Russian I can write only so much and then I’m on the bus again and I am clicking on my notes app and I am tapping the letters. “No one in my family speaks English but me”. This way only those English scriptures will know that I am like this – then maybe my grandma, who cannot love, will finally love me. And maybe then I won't be constantly in danger. 

              If it's in English, it's not me

              I want them all to believe. But it isn’t true. It’s not.