I wrote this prose in August 2024. Consider it almost two years ago. This, if I’m not mistaken, is my third or fourth work that I dared to submit for publication to literary magazines.

When I did an interview with Irina Kotova (b. 1985, artist, practitioner and teacher of kundalini yoga) sitting in her studio in the center of Minsk, in one of the towers on the square. Victory, it always seemed to me somehow subreal. Actually, Irina herself shines as a person with different shades, not like most of my friends. Perhaps these are the fine tuning of her nature, and the experience, trauma and pain that she had to go through...

Too big. Damn beautiful. Yellow gerberas with crumpled petals crowded tiredly into the garden bed. Ask? Don't ask? - in the end, I was tired too. And only today I realized why. Sur is just my thing. Because when you pile it up, confuse and complicate it, and then smear it all over the canvas of mysticism, no one will guess that you are paint labeled “disgusting 003.” Step left. Rotate your foot 30 degrees and another, alternate world opens up.

Madonna Louise Ciccone has constructed one of the most enduring and influential careers in popular music history. Across four decades, she has reinvented herself with a frequency that has become her signature, moving from the streetwise New York dance club denizen of the early 1980s to the Kabbalah-studying spiritual seeker of the 2000s, from the disco queen of the 1970s revival to the Portuguese-inflected Madame X of 2019.