Letter from the quiet town.

Hello my dear unknown friend! Oh, it is so hard to be honest with yourself. To tell my story I need to start from the beginning. I was born in a quiet soviet town with green alleys, sandboxes and lingering rebuilding. We lived on the outskirts in a new lofty apartment house. The yard was lively and noisy and everyone knew each other. When I was a child, my friends told me that their parents had found them in a cabbage or that the stork had brought them. My first best friend was always proud that she had been found in strawberry. My parents were always busy with work and didn't tell me the story of my birth so I didn't know where I had come from. But this mystery made me some kind of an inventor. The world is infinitely broad in childhood. Together with my friends I made my first adventures in wastelands, in roadside forests... Many years have passed but my hometown remains the same. Only the yard has become quiet and I don't know who lives there anymore. One day I found myself in the middle of an all-sufficient stone city where I’d moved. I looked at the world and didn't understand how to live in that place. It was difficult to admit to myself that I didn't want to live in it anymore. So I came back to my boring provincial town. It's more than a thousand years old but I can't find and feel this antiquity. My town is being permanently destroyed and rebuilt. This is not a town — it is rather an illusion of it. While living there you feel that all life is only a dream. I love my town for its strange feature: it pushes you away by its reality so all you can do is to give free rein to your imagination. I feel like everyone who lives there is in a kind of internal exile. Do you think it is bad? I don't know. Frankly speaking, I'm a little bit afraid of the future, which should be more concrete, more synthetic, more rational. I’ve left all attempts to be "adult". I wish the future life will be more poetic and less about psychoanalysis. I naively dream about fairy tales for all of us. Because life is more than any ideology, life is more than any our ideas about life. Dear friend, let life continue even if the childhood is not over in a grown-up! Maybe these photographs will tell you things words can't describe. I hope you could feel something familiar in the eyes of my friends on pictures. Sincerely, your friend Kate S. from Vitebsk.