Chapter 2
Episode 2epizodas narkomano atlridk as cia gyvenu .tsihi 2012mrtsis as buvsu uzregistruota ksimynai dslijodi koluki k kenedy ir chsoso trotijx kurr pdichodelini tad neapyksnta baigesi .×012metsix lazeriu nsmus stgavdu pamsravo stseit ligond ststybininke it nera kenedzio bet hsu nebd lsndzbergus tel sugede ssi wifi klonuotas as nugyventas zmogus tsigi kodel
Some mornings I wake and the world is still a chemical soup, the molecules of last night’s journey clinging to my synapses like wet leaves. I check my phone—the screen is cracked, a spiderweb of light, and the wifi icon flickers like a dying star. Cloned, they said. Everything is cloned. Even my own face in the dark glass looks borrowed.
I was registered in a family once. 2012, March, the month of mud and unreliable light. The documents said I belonged to a woman named Koluki, or maybe that was a street, a district where the trolleybuses stuttered to a halt. Kennedy was there too—not the president, but a boy with a lazy eye who taught me how to hold a cigarette backwards. We burned our fingers and laughed. That was before the psychedelics ended, or rather, before they began to end me.
The hospital room smelled of bleach and old fear. A nurse—ststybininke, I think they called her—pressed a cold stethoscope to my chest and said there was no Kennedy here. No Kennedy anywhere. I wanted to tell her about the laser, the one I saw in the corridor that night, a red thread stitching through the air like a needle through silk. But my lips were sewn shut with the silence I’ve always carried.
I am a worn-out person. That is the truth I keep finding in the pockets of my coat, in the hollow space behind my ribs. Why? Because I live in this body that has been to the edge and back, and the edge left its mark on every cell. Filipe once told me that the grail is not a thing you find, but a thing that finds you. I wonder if I’ve been found, or just stumbled upon.
The phone rings—a dead line, just static. I hold it to my ear and listen to the hiss of the universe, the algorithm of my life scrolling through frequencies I can no longer tune. Somewhere, St. Edmund is waiting for 2026. Somewhere, I am still a child born on the last day of March, swallowing blood before I learned to speak.
But here, now, in this rented room with the broken wifi and the ghost of Kennedy’s laugh, I am nothing but a signal fading into noise. And I keep searching. Because that is what I do. That is what I am.