Chapter 6
Episode 6
Paper loss
The paper trail, I learned, was not a path but a labyrinth, and I had wandered into its most desolate chamber. The voucher files, the profit statements, the tax declarations—they had promised a kind of clarity, a ledger of my existence. But now, in the dim light of my rented room in Vilnius, I saw only the gaps.
It began with a letter from the bank. A thin, official envelope, its contents a cold arithmetic of loss. A paper loss, they called it. An investment that had evaporated, leaving behind only a dry, bureaucratic scent. I stared at the numbers, but they refused to cohere into a story. They were just digits, ghosts of a future that had been promised and then withdrawn.
I thought of the quiet afternoon at Lake Galvė, the water so still it seemed to hold its breath. That was a different kind of accounting—the weight of a stone in my pocket, the sound of a distant boat, the taste of wind. No ledgers, no columns of profit and loss. Just the simple, unyielding fact of being there.
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