The Bag.
A bag promised since childhood, a boutique she was afraid to enter – and the dream that dissolved the moment she stood inside it.
The scene that opens this one is twenty years old: a sushi place on the Arbat, golden youth around the table – personal drivers, the right clothes – and Bella counting kopecks between a cola and a skewer. Not envy, she says. Just the feeling of being slightly extra. And a habit that outlived the table: arriving with full hands, picking up the check, proving.
The boutique in Zurich is where it resolves. The fear at the door – as if I'm unworthy – says out loud what the dream bag was actually made of, and Fear and Control traces that thread precisely: wanting makes expectation, expectation makes fear. Then she's inside, someone smiles, nobody fusses, nothing is conferred. Examined in the open like that, the wanting turns out to belong to the wound, not to her – and it lets go on its own. What's left is an actual choice: Italy, water, rest.
No bag was harmed in this story. Something older than the bag was.
Closing a gestalt
When I was a teenager, I moved in a circle of golden youth. Personal drivers, phones, cars, clothes and so on. I was from a completely ordinary family.
We often went to the movies, go-karting, the arcades and so on. And I remember it like it was yesterday: we're sitting on the Arbat – I think it was a Yakitoria – and I'm deciding whether to order a cola and sushi, or sushi, a skewer and water. Counting every kopeck to make it stretch.
I never envied my friends; rather, I felt a little out of place.
And then, almost twenty years later, when I met up with my girlfriends, that little girl inside me would try to arrive with full hands, to pick up the check – as if justifying the past, or showing that I can.
That's in the past now; I've let that one go. But it was there too.
And recently an interesting story happened. For our daughter's birth my husband promised me a Louis Vuitton bag. Of course it had been a dream since childhood – to walk into the boutique, choose, buy. To close all the childhood traumas with one bag 😂
And so I'm walking through a mall and I see it: pink, denim fabric – simply a dream. A couple of days later I was walking around Zurich and saw the boutique. It was so scary to walk in, as if I were unworthy. But I gathered myself and went in.
They greeted me with a smile… and that was it)
I walked around, touched things, looked. Nobody cared about me at all. In Switzerland they don't fuss over you or push anything on you.
And I walked out of there and got to thinking: do I even need this bag?
It won't make me thinner, prettier or, in the end, smarter.
And somehow the dream stopped being a dream. Better to go to Italy, swim, rest 🤭
Thank you for reading.
If her words reached somewhere mine don't – good. That's what this blog is for. Take what fits and leave the rest.
– Jan