Chapter 1

She turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling, where the shadows from the streetlight cast a faint, shifting grid. Trigonometry, she thought, the art of measuring worlds. The word came unbidden, a fragment from a long-ago lesson, and with it, a memory of a path lined with cherry trees in full blossom. She had walked that path as a girl, her fingers tracing the rough bark, her mind full of simple equations. Now, the path seemed to curve into infinity, its angles sharp and beautiful, its ends meeting somewhere in a haze of forgotten numbers.

On the nightstand, a sketchbook lay open to a page of fashion designs—a dress with a collar of overlapping petals, a coat that swept like a wing. She had drawn them weeks ago, during a moment of clarity, but now they seemed like ghosts of a future she could not quite reach. The sketches were her anchors, but tonight they felt as weightless as the shadows on the ceiling.

She reached for the lamp and switched it on. The light pooled on the sketchbook, revealing the faint pencil lines, the tiny notes in the margins: 2D math scrawled beside a sleeve, trigonomettija next to a hem. She smiled, a sad, tired curve. The words were a code only she understood, a private language of creation and confusion.

Her gaze drifted to the diary beside the sketchbook, its cover worn and stained. She had not opened it in months, but the date—March 21st, 2003—was etched into her mind like a scar. Tomorrow, the diary would begin a new chapter, or perhaps it would remain blank, a page of unwritten possibilities. She had always treated that date as a milestone, a day of reckoning and renewal. But this year, she felt the weight of expectation pressing down, a 99% she could never quite achieve, a pursuit of the ideal that left her breathless.

The insomnia had begun that January, when she had first started decoding the calendar’s secrets. It was a habit born from the chaos of her work in the evolving Lithuanian media landscape—the hours at Balticum TV, the late nights at BNS, the endless meetings about frequencies and ratings. She had witnessed the birth of independent outlets, the struggle for identity in a newly free nation, the hope that clung to slogans like “Europa – mūsų saugūs namai.” But even as she helped build narratives for others, her own story remained fragmented, a collection of half-finished sentences and unanswered questions.

Now, in the small hours, she turned her thoughts to mathematics again—not the sterile formulas of schoolrooms, but the living geometry of her world. The beautiful dichotomy of beauty and sorrow, of light and shadow. She had seen it in the cherry blossoms that spring, their petals falling like tears, and in the faces of the people she had interviewed, each with their own hidden arithmetic of joy and pain. Graži dichotomija, she whispered to the empty room. Beautiful dichotomy. Beautiful until the tears come.

She thought of the sketchbook again, of the watercolors she had used to capture a winter sunset over the river. The colors had bled into each other, creating a wash of gold and purple that seemed to hold all the melancholy of the season. She had written a note on the opposite page: The language of objects: from everyday items to profound meanings. A simple scarf, a worn pencil, a cup of tea—each carried a story, a memory, a weight. Tonight, the sketchbook itself was an object of profound meaning, a repository of her scattered self.

The alarm clock clicked to 3:11 AM. She sat up, swung her legs over the side of the bed, and walked to the window. The city was asleep, its lights scattered like distant stars. In the reflection, she saw herself as a young woman standing amidst ephemeral blossoms, a woman who had learned to smile through the shadows. The resilience was there, a quiet strength she had cultivated over years of navigating love, loss, and the relentless march of days. But sometimes, like tonight, the resilience felt thin, a layer of silk over a wound.

She thought of the diary, of all the names and numbers and unfinished thoughts it contained. There was the name of a boy she had loved in her twenties, written in a shaky hand, then crossed out. There was the number 99%, a symbol of the standards she could never quite meet. There were words like populiarumas and abejonės, jotted in margins, marking the tension between public acclaim and private doubt. And there were blank spaces, entire pages untouched, where the silence spoke louder than any script.

The morning would come, bringing the promise of March 21st—a day of errands, encounters, and observations. She would go to the market, buy garlic and bread, and feel the simple resilience of everyday life. She would walk past the old radio stations, their antennas pointing skyward like exclamation marks. She would see the faces of colleagues, their stories woven into the fabric of a nation still finding its voice. And she would return home, open the diary, and write something—a memory, a hope, a question.

For now, she stood at the window, the cool glass against her fingertips. The night was a mathematics problem she could not solve, but perhaps it was not meant to be solved. Perhaps the beauty lay in the unsolvable, in the equations that spiraled outward like the paths of a unicorn’s horns, in the angles that never quite met. She closed her eyes and let the numbers drift away, replaced by the faintest outline of a new sketch forming in her mind—a design of strength and fragility, of balance and flight.

When she opened her eyes, the horizon had begun to lighten, a thin line of gold at the edge of the world. Tomorrow was here, carrying its promise and its shadows. She turned away from the window, picked up the diary, and held it for a moment. Then she placed it back on the nightstand, next to the sketchbook, and climbed into bed. The insomnia had not surrendered, but she had made peace with its presence. The dawn would bring a new page, and she would fill it with words and lines and colors, one small moment at a time.

As sleep finally began to steal over her, she whispered the phrase that had become her quiet mantra: Naktis viena, nemiga—2D matematika. One night, insomnia—a two-dimensional math. But her life was not two-dimensional; it was a universe of layers, of petals and shadows, of numbers and dreams. And she was ready, once more, to step into the unfolding day.