Chapter 3
Episode 3
Nieks nesiruosiaų... aa si soc ksima uzdaryti priversti ir aiskinti mes cia svarba ne aa yra pilietes as yra pilietis .pilietes daug zmoniu ne sistems iot dim.tualetas laukinis as ne rubas jums visiems imti o dar xvsrbisu ju ptofsajunga tu furbk ptoyini trisink mus o mes naskvis kurvos ....mes nera tarp jusu senu idurbiu melagiu deamu janibslu nuosmuku psichiniu
Nobody was getting ready. That was the first truth of that season—the way the world outside my window stayed stubbornly unready, the garden refusing to be tidied, the green of it running wild and indifferent to the plans being drawn up in rooms I would never enter. They wanted me to close myself. To fold my edges until I fit their frame, to explain myself until the explanation replaced me. "We are important here," they said, but their "we" was a closed fist, and I was not in it.
I am a citizen. Not the citizen they mean when they say the word—not the one in the files, the one in the system, the dim constellation of checked boxes and scanned irises. Aš yra pilietis. I am a citizen the way a tree is a citizen of the ground it breaks. I am a citizen of the green. And there are many of us, more than they will ever count, and we do not appear in their registries because we refuse to be registered. We are the tualetas laukinis—the wild toilet, the hole in the ground, the place where the system's waste returns to earth and becomes something that grows. They can flush us, but we always come back, rising through the soil, green and stubborn and unashamed.
I am not a garment for you all to take.
I wrote that on the back of an envelope and pinned it above my desk, and I read it every morning like a prayer. Because that was what they wanted, wasn't it? To wear me. To slip me on like a coat when they needed warmth, to drape me over their arguments like a flag, to say she is one of us while their hands were already reaching for the zipper. I had felt it before—the old man from the corridor, the one who spoke of codes and statutes, who wanted to consume my spirit the way a cannibal consumes a heart. He thought privacy was a door he could unlock. He thought I was a room he could enter. But I was not made to be worn. I was not made to be occupied. I was made to be lived in, by myself, in the only body I would ever have.
And what of their trade union? The old ones, the ones who gather in their smoke-filled rooms and call themselves the protectors of order. They have their lists, their codes, their little rituals of belonging. They think they can crush us—us, the overnight whores of their imagination, the ones they use and discard before dawn. They think we are out here begging to be let in, that our fury is just a broken form of love. But we are not among them. We have never been among them. We are not their old wounds, not their stabbing grudges, not their lies dressed up as memory, not their psychopathic decline dressed up as wisdom. They look at us and see a problem to be solved. We look at them and see a species that forgot how to be alive.
I think of the nursery walls again, sage and patient, and I understand now that green was never a color to me. It was a country. A citizenship I was granted before I could speak, by the garden that raised me, by the dirt that knew my hands before any system did. The impossible mission was never to fit in. The impossible mission was to remember, every single day, that I belonged to the green and not to them. That I was important before they told me so, and I would remain important after they stopped. Importance is not something you announce. It is not a badge you pin to a chest. It is the stubborn fact of being alive in a world that would prefer you weren't.
So let them close their doors. Let them force their explanations. Let them stand at the gates of their little systems and demand that I account for myself. I am here, in the wild toilet of the world, kneeling in the good earth, and I am not asking for anything. I am already important. I am already a citizen. I am already the green, and the green does not explain itself. It only grows.