tsvetoslav shalev

How sad that my life has not come to mean

for you what your life came to mean for me…

~ Joseph Brodsky, Postscriptum, September 1967

Osaka, Japan, Sunday 29th of March. It’s a couple of minutes past midnight, and the temperature is around 13°C. My transfer flight from Incheon, South Korea, would have landed safely some seven hours ago, at 5:00 PM JST… As you can probably tell, I was not on that flight. In fact, I was nowhere near those locations. Due to a series of health-related and personal complications, I had to postpone this dream of mine until a later date. Strange that I should feel so, but I am not upset by this turn of events. I couldn’t have possibly known that my health would deteriorate so suddenly—nor that I would be spending a significant portion of my waking hours keeping my dog company while he adjusts to sleeping outside our house.

Today’s May 31st. The year – 2026. Six months have come and gone in what feels like the space between two lungfuls of air. Tree branches once naked, like so many bony fingers outstretched towards the heavens, put out their buds, then their fleeting blossoms, and finally dressed themselves in attire fit for the months ahead. Here on the continent of Europe, we are all bracing ourselves for the coming heatwaves, yet a morning chill still lingers in my hometown of Tutrakan. My “repatriation” back to Bulgaria is now in full swing. My last work day was this past Monday, May 25th. Friends and colleagues I’ve worked with these past 4 years kept inquiring as to how I felt. I was tired, disconnected, the opposite of driven, but not much else. Having worked remotely for so long, I’d no tangible attachments to any one place, to any one thing, to anyone. To me, the departure was (and still is) a trite technicality. No arguments, no surprise redundancies, no major complications. No, it all boiled down to contractual obligations I could no longer fulfill, because I physically relocated some ~1600mi (~2600km) south-east of London. A quick network performance test from my garden over 2.4GHz Wi-Fi to a London Freethought server suffers an average latency of ~52ms. It’s astounding what IT infrastructure is enabling, chipping away at physical limitations in an almost exponential fashion. And still we cling to archaic mechanisms that divide us, in the name of optimisation. Please do not mistake my words for cynicism. I outgrew this way of “looking” at the world we’ve made for ourselves back in my early 20s. How, you ask? Simple: by dragging this darkness by the cuffs into the light of grace — the kind that arrives unbidden, neither demanded nor earned — as a form of understanding. It’s not about giving up, but rather about accepting the constraints all of us have to abide by, from the moment we cry our first cry, until the very next, when our breath finally becomes air.

Well, I talked my talk and now it is nigh time I walk it. A friend of mine commented recently that now, I’m a free man and can do whatever I want. He’s not too far removed from the truth about the circumstances which surround me at this stage. I jumped off the plank myself without much resistance, and now that I find myself in the middle of an ocean of possibilities, all I need to do is not drown. Been there, done that? Joke aside, know that unlike physical wounds, some memories never stop bleeding. Fortunately, this isn’t one of them, and so as usual, I keep calm and carry on.