dear heavenly father
Dear father,
Happy new year. I hope my message finds you well and that you’ve thoroughly enjoyed the recent celebrations. Again, I apologize for not having been able to visit you, and I hope the current unfortunate situation resolves itself. Until then I will make sure to keep you updated on my life as you’ve asked of me. My only prayer is that this letter reaches your linguistic standard. It would cause me great anxiety to think of you slogging through an analphabet’s ramblings after all. Naturally, I miss you and hope your legal issues in this ignoble country can soon be resolved facilitating your return.
Anyways, as per our agreement upon separation (for which I remain most grateful, have faith my studies here will be fruitful) I’m writing to tell you about the happenings in my recent life. Now whilst you may believe that us students find ourselves at our most active, eclectic during the festive period, the reality is far from it. In fact, a combination of melancholy due to your absence and my friends going home for the holidays has caused it to be relatively taciturn compared to the usual frenetic nights of Prague. Now beware before you get irritated, I am not saying any of this to complain. Anything but honestly. I’ll be eternally grateful for your permission to continue my studies despite the devolution of your situation. It would be ludicrous for me to complain about a decision I myself had pushed and pleaded for. What I am trying to say is that my experience of Prague around the New Year was far duller than the festivities at the Russian church, or the times our family came to visit and occupied every nook and crevice in the house. The most poignant example to illustrate this are my roommates; Hank returned to Leiden the instant his exams were done, and Max jumped on a train to Frankfurt the morning after.
In absence of any real company to lean on, I spent the days before New Year’s Eve walking around town, having a moment of unfortunate laziness and unproductivity. Once again though, I’d like to distinguish this from fear of hard work, which It admittedly might appear to be. However the restaurant was closed (the chef caught monkey fever and it spread to most of the staff, I am luckily unharmed) so I found myself with no work and no studies. In the envelope alongside this letter, you will find pictures I have taken for you to ensure a sufficiently detailed and hopefully engrossing narration of my life. I ask you to gently look at them now, a number is written on the back of each one detailing sequencing and which of the following descriptions it corresponds to.
1: The first picture was taken at the top of Petrin facing towards Revolucni. I went there for a run aiming to get the most out of my permanency here and enjoying the breadth of parks for offer. On the day it was very misty and the city appeared otherworldly, especially from outside the few places I usually confine my life to (these naturally being my place of work, my home, and my university). Unfortunately the park is still littered with juvenile delinquents.
2: The second picture is taken by the Strahov stadium. I’ve specifically chosen to send you this one because I’m keenly aware of your appreciation for the structure. Czechs doing as they do still leave its magnificence abandoned, utilized for socially unproductive commerce, and left to degradation by an uncaring society incapable of comprehending the sacrifices which have made its great monuments stand. They’re fundamentally letting culture rot. Each time I see it your initial verdict rings truer; the ungraceful ageing of this titian is a tragedy. Tradition demolished, history unkempt.
3: The third picture is me, Maya, Beatrice, Tamara, Josef, and Konrad on the thirty-first of December during our celebratory dinner. On the table you can see our meal: consisting of steak (which I made, cooked rare as God intended), lightly salted oven-baked potatoes, lightly salted broccoli, asparagus which Konrad had frozen for such an occasion with notable foresight, and pumpkin puree. I naturally insisted for a healthy meal, one of sufficient nutritional value and joyous enough for the buoyant occasion. The others appreciated it, the women in particular always appreciating a man who can cook. You’ve taught me that well.
4: This one is a little different. It’s a photo I found at home of us at church with mother. You can see me in the front row with the other kids, standing up and holding a candle. Based on the refiguration of Saint Dymphna in the background (even though in the picture she looks like a yellow stain with eyes, the camera quality is dubious) I’m assuming this was in Kladno. Another nostalgic element is my pained expression, as a child I hated standing around during mass, a dislike I’ve proudly grown past.
Sadly, the space on this page is running out and I’m privy to your feelings about waste. Since I don’t have enough to tell you to fill another page, I am forced to abandon my letter here hoping for an uneventful near future to ensure that the details missing from these past few days make it into the next letter.
With the greatest respect and gratitude,
Yours truly,
Mikhail
Good afternoon,
I’m writing regarding the possibility of being refunded for the upcoming four sessions. Recent developments in my life have made it so I don’t feel the urgent need to come, and seeing as I run on a student’s budget I’m sure you can understand that the money poured into them is quite dear to me. Naturally I remain indebted to the personal developments I’ve garnered from our sessions; be it the friends, the nights out practicing, and perhaps as I may reveal to you my recent success with women (woman singular to be entirely truthful, but its definite progress from when I joined you).
Now as you may intuit, being the master of implicitness you are, the course has borne fruit and my great big hump seems to be at least partially resolved. I don’t want to delve into it in too much detail; like you always say “a gentlemen never tells,” and pillow talk built around specifics is vulgar. What is however necessary and worthy of mention is that it went smoothly, it happened, I’ve unblocked myself, and for that I will always be grateful. Problems facing me now exist outside this course, what you promised to teach me I’ve managed to do.
I recall you asking me for feedback on your course, reflecting on the practical application of the principles taught, and that is the least I could do considering that even after all you’ve taught me, I still have the gall to ask for money back. In the first place, your technique of visualization was highly effective. The conscious decision to create an image of my prey, the bitch to bed, has helped me tremendously in overcoming the mental block we had spoken about. In place of previous attempts where I found myself frozen, immobilized by the discrepancy between a fantasy sexual encounter and the real thing, your goal-oriented approach really helped me focus down, grit my teeth, and get the job done.
Secondly, I utilized the superiority trick. Just like you taught, I ensured that throughout the encounter I sensed my own superiority and made it evident, my own right to her. I tried to not make it too obvious, but I’m sure there was a nuance she sensed in my nonchalance, in my being non-plussed about her. I made my will clear, I shaped the meeting along my own wishes and desires, all with the simple trick of convincing projected superiority.
As for all people recovering from the shared issue of your clients, the first wasn’t the prettiest or the best, but like we both know overcoming the problem is ninety-nine percent of the battle. I will not lie and say that it was an easy ninety-nine percent, but it gives me great relief to know the majority of this titanic task is over. I’ve slept with a woman, on to greater things! With all that, I’ve got to now make the choice, which is most sensible for my wallet, for my future, and unfortunately withdraw from future lessons, receiving my past payments back. I ask you to understand my situation and appreciate my honesty.
Thank you,
Mikhail
Hey Tamara,
We both know why I’m writing this, or at least it feels like we should know. I mean, it’s been kind of a shit show since NYE and it should be addressed in some sort of way. I’m not sure how, I’m not sure about the exact problem we’re dealing with, I’m only sure we have to address it and I don’t want to. Even sitting here behind my laptop I’m second guessing myself. Not a nice thought to have. Definitely not conductive to really getting thoughts on the page. Not in a way which makes sense.
I guess the natural place to start would be the obvious inciting incident: we had sex. We had sex and since then we haven’t spoken normally. Logically I can’t know if you enjoyed it. After we did what we did I was hostile to you because I saw you being frigid. You didn’t communicate to me whether you enjoyed it, you didn’t make it sufficiently clear. What you did instead was make me doubt, and that you did excellently. You women have a talent for that. I’ve never been in so much doubt about a singular event. We had sex and I’m not sure you enjoyed it and you’ve made me doubt myself, doubt why I did it and especially doubt why I did it with you. And I know you knew I hadn’t done it in a while, so my only conclusion can be that you’re a heartless bitch. Logically.
Don’t take that last part the wrong way. It’s just that after putting everything on paper and analyzing it appropriately and thinking about it and feeling like shit I might hate you. Hate is a strong word of course but it’s definitely not made me like you more than before. It definitely made me hate you. I don’t know, it’s just that once we were going at it you saw the situation, how it went. It didn’t go how I thought it’d go and I’m not sure you enjoyed it. I was very drunk and very sure you didn’t then. Now it’s more difficult to piece events together. All I can base my assessment on is the echoes of the moment and they echo betrayal, of myself by you or by what we did together. Again, here we find ourselves on the barrier of what we do know; who was betrayed, and if yes how? If it was a correct thing to do we wouldn’t have had the conflict that follow. The reasoning forms itself no?
See, I re-read my letter and am forced to confront my own questions on us sleeping together. Firstly, I’m not sure what I have to communicate to you. My intention is lost in writing. Originally, the idea was to clear my head through the process and then give some clarity to you. But seeing as we haven’t spoken since even, I’m not sure you want it. I saw when we were all together how your gaze dodged mine. You didn’t enjoy it and hate me. I mean we share friends and we were friends before, maybe. Then we slept together and you betrayed me in some sort of way. I’m sure of the fact I was betrayed, that’s one sure thing. What then? I told you that and had a moment and since then we see each other, and you won’t event talk to me. I won’t make the first move, that’s certain. I can’t make you love something you don’t, or even tolerate it. Maybe the sex was too long, maybe the sex was too rough, maybe you were offended when I told you to be quiet. Well I was drunk and nervous and that should be reason enough to empathize with a friend, to read a little between the lines instead of casting aside the whole book. Why does it seem I always end up going in the same vicious cycle with all women?
I guess the one thing we can probably share is the strange veil of silence surrounding the event. Not sure about you but the others have only passingly asked me about it, and it didn’t get brought up in group hangs. They said, ‘good job’ and moved on. No mention of my time with it, no mention of your time with it or the weird-ass repercussions it’s had. Anyways, I don’t think this letter is headed anywhere, might make a better diary entry for some psychologist to sift through..
Fuck it, no point writing more, I could just be born the wrong way. Something has to give, I just hope it ain’t gonna be me.
Mikhail
I’m doing it again,
I’m writing to myself again. In this situation its good practice to pre-emptively apologize to my future self, I know I’ll (or you’ll?) cringe at reading this, you’ll hate how you thought (or I?), and it’ll inevitably bring up some unpleasant memory. But ultimately, I gotta take care of myself in the moment since that’s all I’ve got. It’s just that writing diaries makes me uncomfortable. I’ve had people recommend them to me, but they always give me a sense of narcissism, of self-mythologizing for one’s own sake which I struggle to tolerate.
So alternatively, I do this. Now I don’t doubt this comes from the same ego-driven depravity, however the difference in modality is enough of a justification for me. At least in this part of my life I firmly try to hold onto manifest reality, be pugnacious in how I catalogue things. So, if I won’t write a diary, I’ll send myself a letter. I need these distinctions to form myself.
Tamara is driving me insane and if you still remember this misstep in the future it’s as bad as I fear it might be. Not that I can admit it to anyone but just as I’ve slept with her, I’ve also had terrible doubts creep in. Naturally, you know how it is in this house; father may be gone but we can never be sure he’s really far enough, that he won’t get into our phone, that he won’t come back any moment and go through our shit, that he won’t simply FIND A WAY. Discretion is key and thus discrete language is the way, where if I’ll still be inhabiting this existence I’ve built for myself in the future decoding this letter will come wholly natural. It’ll just be me facing a problem I’ve always had.
But I slept with Tamara and hated it. I fucking hated it. To be fair, it was a hypothesis I was halfway ready for, at the pick-up course they’d warned me that the first time back to fucking after a while is mainly to wash it out your system, get with anyone and unblock yourself. Which fair enough, makes sense. And honestly, she’s pretty close to my type; skinny, boyish, hard and bony features. And for a moment in the dark touching her body, finding either sharp edges or hard tense tendons I even got excited, I overcame the endless limp-dicks I’d had back when I did sort of fuck. It’s just that when she spoke it irked me, when she said she wanted it in her and she needed it in her and she was a dick-thirsty little slut I was disgusted, even repulsed. It’s difficult to say what about it disgusted me but taken by the moment I needed her to be silent, I had to focus on her body, on her flat chest, her thin hips, her muscular runner’s ass.
My erection left me the moment she toughened up and laid on her back, legs spread out. Play by play aside, it was thoroughly disappointing to see my issue rear its head again. Making her switch on all fours made the situation that much more awkward. Fuck I swear to god I could hear her sigh. Even to write this it frustrates me, imagine in the moment. I hope by the time I’ll re-read this letter the person who forcefully came to the forefront of my mind in the complete silence of the bedroom is forgotten. I hope this moment is forgotten, I hope I have a girlfriend, I hope I find her attractive, I hope I find her exciting, I hope this knot in my head untwists itself, I hope women stop scaring me, I hope women stop angering me with their touch and with how I respond to it, I hope I’m pure, I hope I make everyone proud, I hope I’m ok. Father forgive me.
Mikhail 03/01/23
Hello Luke,
Sorry I haven’t written in a long time. On New Years Eve you came to mind though. Forcefully. I don’t want to step out of line, be too aggressive in my language as I know I have been in the past, but despite our squabbles I felt this was important. Vital even.
Mind you, the last thing I’m going to do is apologize for how it ended between us, the last thing I’ll do is try to change history or rectify how you view me. It’s just that I can’t shake you off. So in some way, against every instinct in me, I do feel obliged to say you were right; that night does come back to mind. No matter how angry it made me and how far away I pushed you. In some perverse way I’m even grateful, thinking of how you saved me from an embarrassing situation with an ex-friend of mine, Tamara if you remember her. You came to mind just as I started dipping back into my bad habits, our night swooped in to make me rise to the occasion. But it’s unbelievable how that one night still haunts me. You have lingered around like a malignant sprit breaking down my assurances in life.
Moments you creep back into my head often coincide with my father popping in for a quick round of paranoia. It’s probably for what you’ve represented and continue to represent, an aberration in my life and nature which I’ve continuously struggled to shrug off. You make me feel asthmatic, an unending cough that makes you forget a life before it, forget what normality is supposed to be.
You and him press me down from two sides, squeezing the life out of me. I try to operate normally, how my friends do. Go out with girls, date them, love them, enjoy them, cheat on them, be jealous because over them. But between the two of you there is no space. He pushed me further then I want to go, you make me sweat it, fearful. If I had the luxury of staying immobile in that space, just reneging on sex all together I probably would. But you know how it goes. Now with Tamara trying to dig in that middle space, trying to see if there’s anything wrong with me, why I acted how I did, I’m being pushed out of my own existence. All of you are trying or have tried to claim a piece of my identity, shape me along your image into an easily understood category. My father wants me to find a girlfriend who’ll become a wife, Tamara wants me to be an asshole, you want me to be something I am not and don’t want to be.
What do I want? Stasis and change. I wanna scroll all of you off and restart. Get a moments breath in and collocate myself outside of the pressures I face. When father left to Russia I thought this might be the moment but it wasn’t enough. We still exist within the world around us, on top of us, below us, staining our divine purity and making our exterior nothing but the result of myriads of stains from a dirtying life.
Ultimately, what this boils down to is that I can’t get rid of you. Sometimes I miss you, and when I was in bed with Tamara, I missed you more than ever. When I touched her taut, smooth legs I wanted them to have wispy blonde hair, when I kissed her thin lips I wanted your fullness, when I went through her long straight hair, I wanted it curly and thick. And all throughout I wanted to think none of that.
Love,
Mikhail.
On the fourth of January 2023 I dragged myself to church. At least, I left house with the intention of going to one. Once out though, I realized that besides the various small Orthodox churches peppered around Prague, I really had no familiarity with religious communities. I mean, I could obviously locate church buildings, but I couldn’t homologate them for shit: catholic, protestant, Calvinist, presbyterian, no idea where each resided, met, and prayed. There’s something darkly comical about that, I could only really claim to know the usual Orthodox shitshow involving me and other poor cunts standing around with candles in our hands, surrounded by eggy looking paintings of saints.
To be positive though, at least my knowledge of Orthodox churches gave me a good notion of places to avoid, places where what I needed would be as likely as an orgy at the office. I mean even the thought of all those people made me uneasy: Karina with her loaded smile and wispy eyes, Magda with her worn out hands and irregular limp, Zhenya and his glass eye, they all stood between me and any gamble at a divine truth. I needed anonymity in church. How can one give themselves up to God under others’ scrutiny?
Whenever a tragic event happens around the festive period people tend to lament the timing. To me, as I shuffled my way through Smichov, it seemed absurd. If anything, I regretted to find myself in doubt right afterwards. If I’d felt the urgency to get in touch with God a couple weeks earlier, I could’ve gone to Christmas mass, I could’ve partaken in a societal vibration so accepted, so widespread, that it must’ve born results. After all, Christmas mass is when non-believing believers flock to church, anonymity is a guarantee. If only, if only; what would I have not given for the chance to walk to church in empty contemplative streets, the deep and coral tonalities of a hymn washing over me, waves on a beach, softening the coarse sand. Instead, I was trapped in a city reawakening to reality, opening its eyes to streets sticky with spilled beer and burnt-out fireworks. Very bodily, too terrestrial.
Trying to come up with a church to take me wasn’t all that easy, the city itself was trying to take my peace away. Cold wind blew down my sleeves and ran up my spine, I distractedly played Bicep through my headphones confusing the rhythm of my body and my morning, the slow electronic drawl in sharp contrast to the frenzy of thought and sensation. Trams rolled through Arbesovo Namesti, ringing loud enough to pierce my earbuds, cars drove by in the four-lane road with their symphony of honks and squeals, a disparate fauna of individuals going about their shopping in the nearby mall. And amongst all that the blank separation from myself, the perspective of museum guest looking at a painting, so far from my own interior truth it appeared unreachable.
I ended up settling on the first church I saw; a large, red-bricked building of an unspecified denomination by the side of a park, across from the municipality of Prague five. I wished I could get some answers here, not daring to pray for them in case they were going to be the wrong ones.
Before heading in I took a deep breath, taking inventory of who I was, my confusion, formulating responses to the GOD who’d given me the labor of life. Father forgive me. Mary be a mother to me too.
Mikhail is kneeling at the altar on the left of the entrance to the church of Saint Wenceslaus. It’s the altar dedicated to Mary mother of Christ, portrayed by a wooden, expressionless statue. Her eyes resemble almonds, wide, low and smooth. If one were to squint, it’d be possible to assume she’s meant to be sorrowful, but in the clumsy hand of long-forgotten sculptor they end up as nothing but two dots on an oval approximation of a face. Her body is similarly anonymously disfigured, conical, and thinning at the neck like a missile silo, draped fabrics not even attempted by the gravely limited artist.
Perhaps due to all of that if you were to follow Mikhail’s eye at the very moment, the squinting left one to be precise, you’d see it directed to the glass behind the statue. The small mirror is situated behind a now abandoned pool of Holy Water, a faux marble plate once painted with a reflective coating, having long lost its shine, and revealing a black and white spotty surface beneath it. It’s positioned on the edge of the church, away from all the visitors choosing instead to focus on the center of the building where a large painting of Saint Dymphna is oddly displayed. Admittedly it is a striking image.
In the place of the expected Christ is a red-haired woman, dressed in an even redder veil, holding a crimson book in her right hand. She’s wearing a white dress, similar to those of many central European rural culturesEven more than that though, what would strike Mikhail’s eye, if he hadn’t stubbornly chosen to try and get spiritual salvation from Mary, is the sword tucked under her arm; a long broadsword alien to any understanding of the present Church, let alone that of women within it. Completing the triad of disparate pictorial elements is the flower gently placed behind her ear, the white tip with yellow bulbs poking out under her scarf. Naturally, most visitors of the church in the predominantly atheist Prague stop at that, not forcibly drawn by any one conventional elements, immune to their power. To them Christ is passe, Mary is boring, the senseless semiotics of Dymphna elicit a freakish curiosity.
But if you were to follow Mikhail’s squinting eye at that very moment, open despite himself, looking for something the Virgin Mary could not give him, you would land at the altar on the opposite side of the church, the one with Christ himself. It’d be a roundabout route, reflected, indirect, fleeting, but indubitably searching for the statue of the Trinity’s terrestrial third. And what a third. Yes, most of the atheist visitors skimmed over Him, seeing it as a routine staple, but shining in Mikhail’s cornea were details unlike anything he’d ever seen.
Christ’s feet were strong and calloused. The toenails sculpted to be thick, uneven, scraggly, veins travelling the neck of his foot all the way to the strong ankle, prominent bones protruding. His calves were bulbous masses, a world away from the typical Christ weakened by torment. The thighs matched the calves, a narrow waist with the legs of somebody strong enough to carry a cross day and night tirelessly.
As per artistic tradition, Christ was wearing a loincloth, and as always it was loosely fitting on him. But in this artist’s eyes the looseness was far more literal, far more real. The loincloth barely appeared to cling on to his waist, revealing the complete form of softly defined abs, from their start at the solar plexus all the way to the v-line pointing at the aborted sex of mankind’s savior.
The spectacle culminated in the glaring contrast between the cross and Christ’s arms, the former flimsy, presumably made with wood found wherever, uneven and unworthy. It appeared incapable of holding down the arms nailed to it, with their anatomically defined lineaments, their balled up fists hiding the nails as if it were not even there, all of forearm, bicep, and shoulder in an apparent immense, universal tension, bursting away from the confine of solid sculpture based on distant divine passage into a vivid reality of flesh and bone, man and GOD, Christ and Mikhail, locked in a stare between the baby-faced mortal at Mary’s altar and the bloodied masculine, gritted teeth of the Trinity. The sculpture resisted immobility, it resisted mortality, it resisted an ascetic asexual tradition with every fiber of divinely created flesh, killed by men only to remain in the hands of oppressive purveyors. And in that refusal, in that insolence of a sculptor, conditioned by a love so strong towards his figure, Mikhail could swear he saw the Christ’s lips move, the Christ’s lips speak.
