Alexandr Korol

Before, I was forever talking, discussing something, whereas now, all these days, I’m silent, more within myself, as if I’ve fallen into thought about something. That’s how it looks from the outside — the way I feel myself: I have no thoughts. It’s as if I’m simply consciousness. And it’s as if there’s something above, and what’s there, above, is also within me. And there’s also this real feeling of how unusually it all comes together — that I’m as if an observer. As if I’m not immersed in anything at all and don’t get immersed, but look at everything from the outside. Even when I was recently riding in a taxi, I noticed that it’s as if I’m not in the taxi, but looking from the outside at the taxi, at myself, at the driver. And again, what’s funny, I begin to recall that it was already like this before. I was like this before, precisely when I was writing my first books. I felt this way before I passed through the places of power in Petersburg in 2010, before the messengers came… As if I’m a ghost and look at everything from the outside. That people are as if in some other rhythm, like pigeons — that is, all identical. And I was super attentive, but not from the mind, simply from being very clear-seeing and aware, from awareness. And back then I remember how many people would tell me, everyone would ask me: “What happened?” — because I was as if always without emotions. Very calm. And everyone thought that maybe something had happened, and I’d say that everything’s fine. I simply looked as if I’m very pensive, that I could sit and be silent, look at one point for a long time — whereas in reality my consciousness was somewhere. Well, more precisely, it’s here and somewhere, I don’t know how to explain it. As if I’m simply super-clear, simply here and now, and a hundred-percent dead calm. What else happened and what I noticed: the path I passed through and described, all these eleven volumes of the novel “Alternative History” — this is, as I joked, like the game “Jumanji”: when you’ve thrown the dice, the bones, and all the circumstances arrange themselves around the situation you have to pass through. And until you pass through it, this situation won’t leave you in peace. As if all this time some forces wouldn’t leave me in peace. And everything I lived through all these years wasn’t accidental, but was supposed to be so. I was a hostage of the book’s main hero. And I lived through all of it in order to pass through it, become aware of it, understand it, and, of course, describe this path. And it’s as if it has ended. That is, I’ve arrived somewhere after all. That’s what I noticed.