Chapter 20
Episode 20
Knyhos visos konteksti ji moneta marioneti nera rimta karaliene nei pseudo kaealyste valkirija yra veidas moters cielo.
The books lay open on my desk, their spines cracked and yellowed, each page a theater of contexts where every word was a coin flipped by a hand I could not see. I spent them recklessly—borrowed meanings, half‑remembered lines from poets in languages I barely understood—and in return, I danced. I was a marionette, and the strings were made of deadlines and ledgers, of promises I had made to people whose names I had already forgotten. The puppeteer, if she existed, never showed her face.
I thought of her, the queen of no real kingdom. Her crown was a costume bought at a secondhand stall near the Vilnius train station, rhinestones missing, the gold paint chipped. Her throne was a chair with a broken leg, propped up by a stack of last year’s Ūkio ūkis magazines. She held court in a room that smelled of damp plaster and stale coffee, and her decrees were printed on thermal paper that faded within weeks. She was not serious. Neither was the realm she pretended to rule—this pseudo‑kingdom of spreadsheets and rented desks, where I was both courtier and fool, where I sharpened pencils and wrote invoices in a language that was not mine while she smoked at the window and watched crows fight over a crust of bread.
I told myself I was in love with her, or at least with the idea of her. But love, like accounting, requires a double entry: nothing is free, everything is balanced somewhere. I gave her my days, and she gave me a role in a play with no fourth wall. I gave her my attention, and she gave me a line to deliver on cue. It was, I thought, a fair transaction.
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