These days, everything seems to be about what to buy and where to sell. If someone writes a novel about this time, then it’ll be full of undies, panties, bras, and these peeps who search for Italian quality at the price of peanuts.

I had never seen Jonas up close before, so I studied him with curiosity. He differed from the others of his kind. His face was different, I decided. His hair was reddish, his skin pale and lightly freckled.

I sank into my reading. Before long, as I was turning page after page, to my own surprise I felt how all those powerful feelings – fear, superstitious forebodings and madness – quickly and easily drew me into their whirlpool, and I was astonished to find something I had always known was there but had not experienced for a long time rising in me: the truest, most natural sensations long forgotten, coming alive and freeing themselves.

Now the dusty, yellowed gold treasury of old news unfolded before my eyes. That was K.’s intention – to acquaint me with erased history. He turned the fragile pages: “From yesterday you’ll learn something about today. I don’t have the patience to read so much.” Thus began my era of Revival.

I feel the sea with my fingers, feet, ankles, barely swirling – the waves aren’t breaking today. The water slowly envelops my body, as if I am sinking into a well with walls into infinity – where is this feeling from which I am returning?

I write V., because it’s easier that way. A stroke down, a stroke up, and a period. V. It doesn’t hurt.

My nest is inside father’s trolleybus. As far back as I can remember, I was always there. The names of the bus stops mark summer vacation, horrible downpours after class, the Christmas Eve rush, the side mirrors completely caked in snow.

I came into the world in those times when storks delivered babies. Sometimes mothers would also find their children in a cabbage patch or in a wicker basket floating in a river amongst the reeds. But I was the only child in the whole village to have been bought.

The love they sing about in songs ends in a marriage that becomes the butt of jokes. True art is born from sexual tension.

It’s hard to create distance, it’s as if you’re looking at yourself dead or you’re dead and looking at yourself. You have to abandon that peel, which means being a Lithuanian, tradition, family, culture, and the like, and look at it from the outside, it’s very difficult, almost impossible, you’ll start to lie, because the truth about yourself is unbearable, or you’ll start to hate yourself, because you will always be lying.