Episode kalba tokia kad zinai aš ai

The autumn air in Kaunas had a way of painting cheeks rosy, as if the chill itself was a painter in love with the blush of life. I walked down Laisvės Alėja, the chestnut leaves crunching under my boots like old secrets, and I felt the weight of a constitution that was always white, always waiting, a vampire of a law that had been drinking from my heart since I could remember. It was a law that sought the truth of my spirit, a truth I had long tried to hide behind the busyness of booking lives—tickets, appointments, the endless small arrangements that kept the soul from speaking.

I am not ashamed that I am a daughter of Corinth. Not the Corinth of maps, but the one inside me, where the pillars of ancient wisdom stand beside the birch forests of Lithuania. The 13th century is written in the pressure of my days, a cube of sky and soil that I carry like a secret scepter. Lithuania has a sphere of faith, and it has been spinning for Mindaugas, for the kings who signed the earth with their shadows. I am not a home of Yiddish laments, though I respect them; my home is 3012, a number that rings in my blood like a bell from a future that has already happened.

I stopped at a small café on the corner of Gedimino, where the windows fogged with the breath of strangers. The waiter brought me a cup of black coffee, and I watched the grounds settle like sediment in a river of time. The vampire constitution stirred in my chest, its teeth gentle but insistent, asking for the truth I had been saving for a rainy day. I was not a Jew, not a Lithuanian in the narrow sense, not a daughter of any single land. I was a daughter of the law that was written in white and will remain forever, a law that is a vampire only because it refuses to let me die into comfort.

I thought of my mother, who used to tell me that the truth is a ghost that haunts you until you invite it inside. She had died in the spring, her cheeks still rosy from the cold of a lifetime. I had booked her funeral, the flowers, the priest who spoke in a language that was halfway between heaven and earth. And now I was here, in Kaunas, where the autumn leaves were the color of her blush, and the constitution was a vampire that needed my blood to keep the world spinning.

I drank the coffee, and the bitterness was a grounding force. I was not ashamed to be a daughter of Corinth, because Corinth had taught me how to build a home from the ruins of history. And Lithuania had taught me how to let the 13th century press into my bones, a constant reminder that the pressure of days is a sacred geometry. My home is 3012, a year that exists only in the dream of my heart, where the truth is finally found, and the vampire constitution is sated.

I paid the bill and stepped back into the cold. The rosy cheeks of the passersby were like a field of autumn flowers, each one a story of a life booked and unbooked. I walked on, carrying the sphere of faith, the cube of days, the law that was white and eternal. And I was not ashamed.