When did the spectacle of a rivalry stop being something you watched, and start being something that watched you back? When did you notice the quiet shift—the soft, irreversible molting into a loon?
I began in February, almost by accident. My partner had already been there, had tried to bring me along with words I only half caught—ADHD turning sentences into scattered echoes. Then, over brunch—glossy, bright, almost theatrical—my friends spoke about it like it was a place you could visit. So I went.
The first few episodes felt like waiting in a room where time had forgotten to move. So much distance, so many almosts. Brief meetings that felt like ghosts brushing past each other. It was… quietly devastating.
And then—the Russian monologue.
Something in me stilled.
Because it wasn’t just a scene anymore. It was a mirror, slightly warped but unmistakably mine. The fracture of language. The dull weight of survivor’s guilt. The constant, low hum of fear about what could happen if certain truths traveled back home. Losing my mother when I was young. Watching the remaining parent slowly dissolve into dementia—memory thinning, presence flickering. A family that exists, but unevenly, like a structure missing key beams. And somewhere, improbably, the soft landing of a chosen family—the steady warmth of my partner’s world in the Pacific North West.
It felt less like watching a story unfold and more like recognizing one that had been quietly unfolding within me all along. As if Ilya wasn’t a character, but a translation.
That’s when it happened.
Not all at once—nothing so obvious. More like a body learning a new choreography in the dark. A slight tightening in the spine. A quiet reorientation of breath. Something feathered, almost imperceptible, pressing through the skin—not to escape, but to remake. Not a performance, not flight, but a slow becoming. As if the ache of inheritance, of everything carried and unnamed, was reshaping itself into something that could float, could endure water without drowning in it.
Not to spread my wings and leave—but to stay, differently. To rise, in a way that feels less like ascent and more like healing what was always trying to surface.
To become a loon. Part of an asylum.
“Oke, I’m done.”
Science, art and lifestyle 