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[Alexandr Korol]

Just locations that caught my attention while looking at the map — without
reading the names, without checking reviews, and certainly without
thinking. There were no thoughts at all. During my birthday, I visited — let’s
count — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight locations. It all
started not too early, around 12 PM, and my adventure outside the house
ended at 11 PM.
Now, here is the most interesting part. The only person I told a little bit
about what happened — how I spent my birthday — was Big Alexander. On the
following day, September 13th, I call Big Alexander, and he asks: “Well, how
was it?” I tell him everything, and he says: “That’s hardcore, that’s hardcore.”
I continue telling him, and he says again: “That’s hardcore.” I ask him:
“So is it this or that?” And he says: “It’s this, and that, and that. It’s hardcore.”
Funny, isn’t it? But what actually happened? In reality, the entire day, from
12:00 PM to 11:00 PM, my friends and I were like characters in a movie.
We spent all of yesterday and today discussing it just to somehow grasp it and
record it. We were simply as if in a cinema. Every location — there were eight
of them — felt as though we were behind glass, or in a vacuum, or a bubble.
We didn’t feel the air temperature; it felt as if we weren’t even breathing.
We were “outside” of people — there wasn’t a moment where we felt doubt,
or worry, or even thought about where to go, or whether we liked something
or not. None of that. It felt as if all day long, some beam from above was
irradiating us and controlling us, and we were just watching it like a dream.
My friends kept saying it was unreal, unreal. Everything that happened felt
impossible, like a dream — everyone said that. You don’t feel your body;
you have no thoughts. At that moment, you are so far beyond thinking that
you completely forget your personality, who you were, and how you lived.
You have no thoughts of tomorrow; you are simply here and now, and
everything is so intense, as if you are in a film. It’s also funny that for some
reason we had this association — considering I cannot and do not want
to state where I am — but the association was that everyone kept saying it felt
like we were in America. We can infer from this that I am not in America.
But everyone, myself included, said aloud to each other that we felt like we
were in a movie, in an American movie.