Life As Game(s)

Life as A Game of Checkers 

His hands never knew gentle. Only hard work. Since he could carry a sickle, he always was in the field; later – in the garden, at the property, where 20 years later, your parents would build a house, planting potatoes or digging them out. The soap your grandfather used was the cheapest and was called "domestic." Its texture reminded you of sandpaper long before you knew what sandpaper was. Eventually, he bought you a baby one, the more you stayed over.

After half a day of physical labor, he would tell your grandmother he'd gone to the "garages" to work on the car, and when he came back, he smelled sweet and acted funny. It wasn't until you were 12 you figured he went out there drinking. But by that time, he'd already quit. You watch his tree trunk fingers move a white checker. You watch your innocent fingers move a black queen and eat his piece. You never questioned why it was so easy to beat him. You never questioned why everything was so easy. You thought you were smart. Playing with your dad was different, exponentially harder the older you grew.

On a call last weekend, your mother gently suggested it might be time for you to get botox. You said you didn't want to because your forehead's lines are the exact same as your grandfather's. Two long ones all the way through and two short ones framing them on the left – perhaps, a side effect of raising your left brow in question or despise, exponentially a little too often as you grew older. Your grandfather is sick now, and there are 9833.47 kilometers or 6110.24 miles and at least 22h&40m between you. It's unlikely you manage to play another game of checkers.

Life as Sticky Head

You receive his Christmas letter, and you can't believe it made it all the way through to SF from North Caucasus. Inside of it, nothing of warmth at first. He was never that kind of guy. Instead, a funny note and two rounded stickers with his stupid face attached to a body of Tinkerbell. He did tell you he loves you at the end of the note, though. Perhaps, for the first time. You are so removed from that world at this point that it makes you wonder if Tinkerbell became an inside joke, but even if it did, and even without the context, you still giggle. His 32nd birthday is coming up, and you dive into your digital archive to compose him an embarrassing reel – the best you can do under your current circumstances. The first video is from 2003. You are 18. Way before you two became friends, long after he acknowledged you as one. You both are way too drunk. There is another friend whose birthday is also coming up, shortly after his. Those two were friends a decade before you knew them, but you are close to certain they no longer speak. You don't.

On the video, you are playing Sticky Head, a budget version, no fancy apps. You remember that series of nights strictly from the videos and by the way they ended, usually with your head resting on a toilet seat. It's during those nights you learned not to mix alcohol with weed, and it will be only later and across the ocean that you'd learn you are not a fan of weed at all. But at the time, despite the ever-present desire to escape the orders, you were so lost that you found comfort in people telling you what to mix and what not to, what to do and what not to.

– Am I ___________(fill in the blanc)?

– Yes.

– Am I ____________(fill in the blank)?

– No.

You lost the round.

Life as "Where To?"

Full disclosure, I've never played the game, but it seemed fitting to the context.

"In this travel adventure game, the world is only a scooter ride away."

When I was living in St Petersburg, where a new foreign adventure was a scooter ride away, I've made a decision to have my age match the number of countries I've traveled to. 2020 humbled those plans. Good thing, though, I was ahead of the game and still had at least a year or two to chill. But I've cheated severely, counting my birth country and even the countries I would just pass through on a road trip through North and also because, at some point, my parents made a decision to show me the world way before I could make any sense of it. But I was so lucky, so goddamn lucky to measure my life by heartbreaks and trips that followed them. Every time I look at the list and Hungary or Italy scratches my eye I remember tears on the plane flying in and life being reborn again on the plane flying out. Recently we spoke about our obsession and have established that when it comes to my mother – she collects sunglasses; for my father – it's socks. I collect trips. I think I might be doing well in life.

Life as Ouija Board.

Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on January 7th. You call the whole holiday season "the season when my mom goes nuts." But in 2015, the one who went nuts was you. 2014 was the year you had to come back home. 2014 was the year your friends took you camping at the seaside. It was probably June or July. You were laying there, in the middle of that summer night, on the stones still warm from the midday sun, counting stars. Igor was pointing at constellations. You have all known each other since your 5th grade. They all were older, and all knew each other from the age you were when you were in 5th grade. Yet the fact that Igor was in that kind of stuff somehow escaped you all, and you all were pleasantly amused and surprised. He talked about that girl, opening a business, an Asian cuisine restaurant, and moving to Hong Kong. It hasn't even been a year yet since you two came back from Hong Kong. The next day he drowned.

His body was never found.

In January 2015, you go on a ski trip with your parents, and your mother suggests for the occasion of Christmas, you get into some traditional future-telling business that involves a drawing paper with numbers and alphabet drawn on it in a circle and a dessert plate with an arrow drawn on it. It will be only later that you'd learn it's a budget version of Ouija Board, so at the time you agree. At first attempt, nothing works. All three of you are drunk, there is a pet present, all lights are on, no window cracked open, no candles lit, and you and your father can't stop laughing when your mom says with all seriousness confined in her in a deep voice "Spirit of all Spirits bring a Spirit of Pushkin to us". After a good 20 minutes of uncontainable giggling, you and your dad abandon the experiment. But your mother is a determined lady. A week later, you are back home, and she suggests you try again. You are 20 and jobless, so with nothing better to do, you comply and ask a friend to join you. This time everything is according to canons, and you shiver when the plate starts to move. You look at your friend and say, "Don't pull it, you idiot"

She says she didn't. You look at your mom; she shrugs and smiles. You find comfort in it. It all must be a joke. For the next half hour, a plate spins and swirls around the drawing paper, and you nudge each other to ask names of your future husbands and kids, where you'll live, and what you will do until the plate suddenly stops. You look at your mom again. She shrugs, but there is no comfort in it. She asks, "Spirit of all Spirits, reveal who is here." You don't feel an urge to laugh. The plate makes a few rapid strokes across the canvas and stops.

Then it starts to move slowly.

I G O R Z A V A L

You sprint away from the plate and the table and into the corner. It was one letter past what everyone called him.

I S H I N

No-one still standing at the table knew his real last name, and you certainly weren't the one pushing the plate. You stand there in the corner, half-lit by the candles, your face buried in your hands, you shivering from horror or the breath of wind coming through a cracked-open door to the garden.

"I am sorry I didn't mean to scare you." Your dad reads with pauses as the plate keeps moving across the paper. "I just wanted to say I miss you. Please don't blame yourself. It wasn't your fault. I am at peace. If you can, let me talk to the boys."

It's all fun and games until it isn't.

It would take you a week to gather yourself. It will take you another to gather yourself and the boys in one room. That week will be the last time you all talk to Igor.

Life as Jumanji

You came back older now. You think you've seen it all in the Jungles of Mother Russia. All the predators, all the creatures. But the game never fails to surprise you. You fall into the same traps. It's all way less poetic this time, with not many rhymes. To be frank, you never were much of a poet. You can resolve puzzles faster, though, with more grace and sophistication. You went to school for that. And as I've said, you came back older. You move older, slower – but it's a slowness of the wise, not slowness of age. And with a little bit of luck, with a little bit of chance and a few good friends, who knows, maybe you'll manage to face your hunters and win the game.

Life as A Game of Chess

Adaptation of Queen's Gambit came out in October of 2020, and it wasn't until then that you'd begin to question why your grandfather only taught you how to play checkers but not chess. Then, yet again, you'd remember, everything was always easy with him. It'd be not the first time you accuse your parents of not teaching you something just because they hated it, something like music. And it'd be May of the following year when you'd pull out your favorite trick and agree to a trip to Hawaii with a Frenchman you barely knew and was yet to sleep with, after the man you knew all too well and did sleep with had broken your tender Soviet heart. Shortly after the drama of it would settle, you would remain friends with both, the man who had broken your heart and the man who'd brought you to Hawaii and with all his friends too. The memory of them playing chess on the beach, drinking wine, and eating cheese as the sun rolled down behind the cliffs, coloring the sky in sunburn colors, would long linger. In the climate of the Bay, however, it would take you, I am yet to know how long, to make peace with a true sophistication of a life you deemed simple.

Life as A Game of Jenga

I look at the tower that took me years to build and rebuild and rebuild again.

At this stage, it all comes down to the matter of one wrong move: one misspelling while filling the documents, one missed date, one not-so-sober confession, one miscalculated text message. I move slowly and with precision, but I am also frequently drunk on praise and success and Pliny the Elders they sell down the street in a fancy corner store.

As I pull a log from somewhere in the middle to put it on top, my phone buzzes, and it distracts me, "Listen, I've been trying, but it's tough to get a visa to the US now, so… I know you've got a bright head, but maybe you'd start looking for somebody to marry you" my dad says. …but luckily, the tower does not fall. I hang up the phone and keep moving.

OPT.

LinkedIn.

My website.

Portfolio.

AWP.

MFA.

The tower keeps growing taller.