Tezos

Step #00179. Cracked Moon

Creator

tz2WqeVWJMr8W7psSNTxVJsZwX48wtxtmzry

Description

I was sixteen. My first week in a new city was spiraling. At the Kyiv train station, I was hustled out of some cash almost immediately. From the station, I headed straight to a tattoo parlor. I was seething with a desire to take ownership of my life—and by extension, my body—to do with it exactly what I pleased. I picked out a nice-looking Japanese character, 失, from a catalog and got it inked without bothering to understand what it meant. I found out the definition a couple of years later. Ironically, my body is now adorned with the symbol for "error, loss, defect." Running away from home was a gesture of desperation. It was a refusal to accept house arrest and a homophobic reality. I stole 300 dollars from my parents and wrote a goodbye note, though its contents lacked any real drama: "Left for another country. Goodbye." There was no point in describing the reasons; the conflict with my parents the night before had explained everything. Teenager. Gay. Homeless. Unemployed. The realization of all this was hollowing me out, crushing me, making me angry, causing physical pain. I feverishly cycled through my options. Steal to feed myself? Sell my body online? Sleep in the park in summer, sure, but where in autumn or winter? Where do I wash—in the Dnieper? Wash my clothes there too? It was bleak. After a sleepless night, on the third day, I walked into a McDonald's, bought a coffee, and sat in the corner to contemplate my prospects. A loud group of kids landed at the next table. One guy was loudly bragging that his dad was gifting him a BMW in a month, and that next year he was flying off to study in London. That was probably the first time I felt a visceral, unconscious class hatred. It made me think about how my position and his were just a fucking roll of the dice—an accident of birth that places one person in these conditions and another in those. By the end of the week, I stood on a roof, drunk, with tears in my eyes, ready to jump and end it all. A couple of thoughts stopped me: "I can kill myself at any moment, so why now?" "I’ll come back to this when it becomes clear: this is the end." "I want to see what happens next..." Flux + Kylodzi low-rank adaptation, digital manipulation, loop by Hailuo, dither, converting to GIF 768 × 1136 px

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