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.

Survive.
The most important thing is to survive.
It’s the morning now, and I need to get up. To push on. To work. To do things.
Another day to be endured.

Every art project is created on the basis of illusions you have at a particular stage of your life. They keep hold of your attention over what you do, over the things you live through. Perhaps, if there were no illusions, we would die much sooner.

Drama actors learn how to throw things in their first course, but no one teaches opera soloists things like that. And that’s why they don’t know how to. How to throw things, how to fall down, how to show their emotions, how to show what they want. They just stand there like singing scenery and think about their melismas.

While the scandal was unfolding in the Lithuanian press, like the stages of a nuclear explosion filmed in slow motion – first, a shocking flash, then an impact, then a rapidly expanding mushroom, finally turning into a cloud of radioactive sediment – another line of transmission, another genealogy of public memory, was forming in Tomas’s head.

Everything was so peaceful and ordinary, but something didn’t fit in this idyllic picture, in this paradisiacal dream. And then Liepa understood what it was: their eyes, the eyes of everyone seated at the table, were dead, those weren’t even eyes but black holes in their faces through which one could see the darkness of another world.