I LOVE YOU

The initial design was that after the first year of renewed, though the better word here would be ‘re-started,’ studies, I would go to China, Wuhan, as an exchange student, as per my sophomore-year calendar, the 2nd year of academic studies that I had once, ‘back in the old days,’ already completed, the time that coincided with the arrival of the COVID lockdown, the virus that ironically spread to the world owing to its origin in... Wuhan, China. The very pandemic era, whose immediate and progressive rise was the very thing that once pushed me out of my controlled and conservative academic path into this insanely imbecilic pursuit of all-elusive art.

When, in May of 2023, I received the invitation, I accepted it without extra delay, though with moderate formality.

I was getting my documents all ready and my stuff all packed. After spending almost a full year incapable of writing even one screenplay, no, even one scene, after undergoing extreme identity collapse and life-direction disequilibrium, after having my ‘WriterDuet’ account go unupdated for the last four seasons, I almost began to entertain the fancy of having this path of Mandarin-language acquisition and immersion as the one where, and how, I was meant to redirect my life path and readjust my life choices and fiascos. I even contemplated the possibility of starting to write things mainly in Chinese, now that all of my writing in English had failed to work out in the end, following the path of the contours of the Russian tongue.

The major I was attempting to pursue, no, ‘pursue’ is the wrong word here, so... the major I was trying to get this time was not just ‘Foreign Language: English,’ but also Mandarin.

To be entirely forthcoming, prior to choosing that as the second language over the likes of Korean and Arabic, I had harbored within me no amour nor admiration for this particular foreign tongue. My decision to choose it was limited merely to practical reasons. Though, perhaps, there was more of a spiritual reason too: it was the only thing that was new to me at this new establishment, the only educational provision I had never tasted nor tried in the span of my whole lifetime until that moment arrived.

For a moment too, it felt as though, humiliated in English, I was to let it go at last, and, welcomed to Mandarin, I was to embrace it fully as life's further progression.

As per July 2023, I was almost ready to cross the borders towards the new, unstepped terrain. Yet something, undiscussed earlier, breached the surface: the financial restraints. Considering how all the money in my bank account was still needed to cover the cost of the upcoming university study years, along with functioning as a possible emergency fund, it was anything but prudent of me to waste it on that trip. You heard it right. I did not use the word ‘invest,’ but ‘waste’; I did not apply the word ‘exchange program,’ but ‘trip.’ From one angle, it could have been an ‘investment,’ considering the practical means of such a ‘pursuit.’ Yet, it had never been a pursuit: not something I would have counted as such... as pursuit. Contrary to that, my creative devotion, despite all its abstract and quixotic layering, I would name as a path of both... both pursuit and investment. Less because my financial future depended on it, though that’s partially true as well, more because in soul and in heart I gave myself to it completely, just as I immersed myself in it mentally and emotionally.

Now, in retrospect, though there is no regret I harbor within me, I can see crystal clear, with no pink glasses clad, how, to a degree, I might have invested in an unstable, too-shaky basket, might have pursued what flew higher and further than what I could ever have been capable of flitting.

In that July of 2023, I should have chosen to fly abroad; I ought to have never declined the offer I had already received in the month I turned 23. I should have given my all to studying Chinese and immersing myself in its environment. Perhaps then my creative compulsion would not have changed form, but rather transitioned in language solely. I could have jumped from writing screenplays in English to writing them in Mandarin.

By the end of July 2023, once I announced I was not moving anywhere, on my way back home my feet led me to a stationery store that was located near the neighborhood I inhabited. From there I purchased two huge and thick notebooks, one with a black cover and the other brown. I would not call that ‘acquisition’ a rational procurement, though to call it impulsive shopping won’t be truthful either. I calculated that I needed to study Mandarin on my own with greater ardor and much deeper internal motivation if I was not to fall behind, if I was not to lag behind the groupmates who had gone to China to study Mandarin, as I had intended.

Before I was about to commit myself to a new language of a film-writing career, I wanted to ensure I had gotten rid of all the material I once had gathered during my unfinished literature degree. There were many printed and written things that I threw out that day, all related to the times when I would register for writing courses.

As more and more scribbled A4 papers and notebook pages piled up in one corner, in the other there lay on the floor my freshly bought A5-sized notebooks. Among all of those ‘ephemera,’ there happened to be the printed drafts of the ‘Blackbird Whisper’ screenplay, both in Russian and English: the Russian draft I had written back in 2019 and the English ones I’d written by the end of 2021.

It takes less time and concern to obliterate a ring you bought in some cheap store; it necessitates prolonged contemplation to discard a ring that has heavy diamonds and karats. And if we take it even farther, it is almost a matter of months and years rather than mere days and hours to relinquish a wedding ring in which you invested years of devotion and adherence to your matrimonial vows.

I have always found the idea of ‘marrying art’ slightly stupid, slightly exaggerated, and even slightly too pretentious.

Not that I would not believe them when they, the artists, would proclaim such obnoxious, according to me, claims, yet... yet I could not trust that either. Nonetheless, especially with each passing year that I always ended up giving away, stupidly enough, habitually for free, in the name of art, more and more I would start comprehending the underlying meaning behind it. I wish I didn’t, though. I wish I had never grasped that and met my death totally oblivious to its subtext.

Thus, holding in one hand a final, long-time-ago-compiled English screenplay draft of ‘Blackbird Whisper,’ in the other clutching the brown-covered notebook of recent purchase, I was overflowing with emotions I can’t name even to this day. I cried that day. I wept that moment. I was on the verge of imagining myself as a mother who was just about to commit the crime of abandoning her child, her own blood, was ready to throw the ‘creation of God’ into the rubbish bin from where nothing gets picked up by others, only discarded, all with the reasoning of ‘crossing to the other land.’ And that, to my own utter bewilderment, I found an irrational act, illogical reaction, thoughtless emotion.

I don’t know... I don’t remember how it occurred that I started filling that notebook’s pages. I can’t think of any reason that drove me to that point, though I should see better to it that if indeed there was something that prompted me into that new path, it was never logic: it has always been an emotion, an instinct, an alignment.

As the dusk started to approach outside the window, and by then three to four hours had already passed, re-reading the four to five pages of prose I had just finished jotting down, I at first could not react.

The next day, the next week, the next month, though I didn’t know what that had been, I already knew what it was.