Character: Slava Kurilov

Motherland is, first of all, the soul. It spread everywhere and looked at me with a thousand eyes. There was some kind of magical silence, the world became animated. I was afraid to move, so as not to frighten her. It seemed that everyone around was participating in the farewell ceremony.

... a fire drill sounded on the liner. The timing was obviously wrong. Tourists have already managed to wake up and get drunk, and it’s very good to get drunk, when they suddenly heard sharp trills of an incomprehensible signal. The first natural reaction of the Soviet people was the usual - not to pay any attention and continue to drink.

It seemed to me that the only normal and sober person on the ship was me, who decided of my own free will to jump overboard tomorrow night!

In fun more and more anguish was felt. People tried to forget themselves at any cost: everyone knew that very soon this ghostly life, which they got for only twenty days, would end, and everyone would return “there”. As many people took part in the dancing as the decks could hold. Dances often turned into wild dances, like African dances - so they better expressed the state of mind. For an uninitiated person, the liner could easily pass for a cheerful madhouse.

I did not feel fear, I turned into a boy running away from the guardianship of adults out into that alluring forest with wild animals. I was told so many horrors about it that I simply could not go on living without having been there.

And then silence fell over me. The sensation was sudden and startled me. It was like I was on the other side of reality. I still didn't fully understand what had happened. Dark ocean waves, prickly splashes, luminous ridges around seemed to me something like a hallucination or a dream - just open your eyes and everything will disappear ...

I couldn't think about the future - I didn't have a future. At the appointed hour, I take my swimming gear and go to the stern of the liner, then jump into the darkness and ... complete uncertainty. I could not think about the past - it disappeared, fell away by itself. All my attention was focused on the present. I live in this segment of the present, and it, like shagreen leather, is inexorably shrinking.

The ocean chose the most elegant waves for me, huge snow-white clouds descended very low, the sun appeared from behind the clouds before plunging into the ocean, and painted the whole sky with the most incredible colors ...

Everything around seems lifeless and dull, like on an abandoned planet. People are wrapped up from head to toe, faces cannot be distinguished, their gait is somehow unnatural, everyone tries to turn their backs to the wind, shrink into a ball and often jump up and down. You can be horrified by one thought - to live here for years! It seems that people do not live here, but survive after some kind of catastrophe, when this planet was subjected to glaciation, having lost all its former beauty, and now only random spaceships occasionally fly by.

I will show you the beauty of the present, the beauty of the moment without past and future. You will know the inspiration of escape, you will know the beauty of the world, you will see the ocean surf, you will feel the breath of the trade winds and the scents of the jungle. Not? Want to sit in a quiet corner watching TV?

At that moment, the thought flashed through my mind that my situation was not at all hopeless yet, and I was just killing myself. I mustered all my will and "looked fear in the face."

A passion for the sea, as a disease struck me since then, as I began to remember.

It is not necessary to create their theories, to accept others and, especially, to follow them. If you're following a system, you will always be hanging "you should", and you will never be inwardly free!

"As a spoon cannot taste the soup..." is the beginning of ancient Indian aphorism. One of the most important events of my inner life was the discovery that I'm really just only a "spoon".