Kvartira
It’s finally getting cooler in the evenings now and last night I had a pretty restful night of sleep. Deep sleep could have been a little better but REM sleep was off the charts. I feel generally good, not groggy, and overall the typical Sunday morning routine went as well as expected. My youngest boy was a bear this morning but that’s more common than rare. Surely you would understand, he’s 2 and a half years old and kind of a big deal.
For today’s session I stuck with a 45-minute Dick Sutphen custom self-hypnosis track that my good friend stitched together by splicing a couple of different tracks and adding binaural beats in the background. It’s a solid one and really fun to practice with when learning exit techniques or medium to large-scale visualizations. After relaxing completely I got into the zone. For whatever reason today required a lot of itching to settle down but eventually I was ready to drop into a place I know well and begin my visualization walkthrough.
As I floated on a “perfect cloud” the count-up began. On the count of 3 I was standing inside my grandparents’ apartment. Usually these things are all over the place for me initially until I can stabilize them a bit, but today I kept my position at the front of the door and looked forward down the hallway, observing, as the rest of the environment built and materialized around me. The indoor lights were on but not everywhere. I could see the outside through a kitchen window to my left and it was night.
An Aside: Even in the dark you can see the stoic appearance of these buildings. Kвартира (kvartira), pronounced kvɐrˈtʲirə, simply means “apartment.” The buildings themselves weren’t of the highest-quality construction but that was also a feature. These types of apartment buildings were constructed out of prefabricated concrete panels or bricks en masse to accommodate the population with single-family homes during the Soviet Union. Growing up, this is all I knew other than little farm houses out in the country, but even there these “panelki” could be seen dispersed throughout the cities. They were also referred to as “khrushchevka” and “brezhnevka,” named after Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, and officially can be described as low-cost, three- to five-story apartment buildings constructed from the early 1960s, while the brezhnevka is a higher-capacity version (nine to seventeen stories) built from 1964 to 1980.
Back to the action: to my right was a recessed hallway closet with wooden bead curtains draping down the front and the entire length of the cavity in the wall. I remember these fondly as I used to play with those green, blue, and yellow beads and inevitably break them. I’m sorry grandparents, it wasn’t just the dog.
I walked a few steps down the hallway and saw the familiar large vanity-type mirror with a red bench beneath it. This is where the home phone was stationed on a small corner table. Directly across from that was an entrance to one of the bedrooms. The door was shut but somehow I also knew it was dark in there.
I then moved all the way to the end of the hallway and into my grandparents’ master bedroom through a door on the right-hand side. It was dim, light from street lamps at the back of the apartment building grounds coming through the balcony window. I then turned around and entered the living room, which was a few paces to my right as I walked away from the master bedroom.
The living room opened up through tight, solid, brown French doors. I always thought this was funny back when I lived here: the French doors were literally the size of a single panel door and the entrance itself was positioned at a 45-degree angle. There I was looking at the room in which I spent a lot of my time sleeping, doing homework, and playing with my Legos. For four years I slept here in what can best be described as a “hospital bed.” It was basically a very nice chair during the day that converted into a tiny bed at night, closer to the size of a cot rather than a twin mattress.
I walked around, passing through furniture like a ghost. One of the walls was outfitted with built-in storage, and at the end there was a small desk that folded out of the wall. This is where I wrote my first short story, which was part of my first-grade homework after my mother and I moved in with my grandparents. It was an impactful moment in my young life and became a core memory. I remember how much fun I had writing the short story, how immersed I was in the process, and most importantly how it was received by the entire class.
The week after I handed in that short story our first-grade teacher read it aloud in front of the entire class as an example of what creative writing is all about. The essay itself was about me writing this story while being interrupted by a mouse darting from behind the built-in storage and the desk that I was working on, a sort of “story about writing the story.” The whole class laughed at the funny parts and asked me a ton of questions during our break. I was over the moon. It’s always nice to get recognized for good work but it’s even more impactful when you’re surprised by the reception. The writing process didn’t feel like homework but rather something I loved doing to begin with. I just didn’t know until right then and there. I often recall this memory when I’m doing something new and I get the sense that I’m remembering rather than learning, because that was the first time I felt anything like that.
After a few moments of reminiscing I made my exit and headed back down toward the front door. There’s another small hallway that leads from the entrance to the kitchen. Built-in storage cabinets lined the entire small hallway on one side and the other side had two doors, one to the toilet and the other to a bathtub and sink. At the end of the hallway was a small kitchen where I have many beautiful memories: gathering with everyone in the mornings, having difficult conversations in the afternoons, and planning our next day’s events in the evenings. The kitchen window looked out to the front of the building, the main entrance just to the left of the window that had an old and very weathered concrete cover.
I paused as I replayed the memory of my grandfather reaching up to grab an unmarked container on a shelf above where he sat at the table. This is where my grandparents kept their seeds, not all of them but important ones. Life during Perestroika wasn’t easy. Fresh produce was either hard to find or expensive, so my family got busy and grew everything we needed on a small farm a few miles away.
At some point in this walkthrough I got turned around and confused and ended up either in one of the bathrooms or in front of the big vanity mirror in the main hallway. Soon after my struggle to regain clarity my activity halted to a complete stop with what appeared to be lights turning on near me. I felt like I was blinded by an intense yellow light. I could see shapes of structures, furniture, and fixtures but still wasn’t completely positive where I was anymore. With that I let it go and felt myself sucked back to my present state, lying on the day bed in my office 6,700 miles from where I was just reminiscing.
After the session I couldn’t shake the feeling that this is what it must feel like being a ghost, and perhaps there was someone in that apartment who felt a non-physical presence which prompted them to flick on the lights.
I know I would.
