Hodgepodge

By Valentina Romanova

Hodgepodge is a collection of thoughts and stories; seemingly unconnected at first sight, they all come back to one thing that is at the very foundation of our day-to-day lives: love. Sometimes unnoticed, oftentimes ignored, occasionally overrated. Love comes in different forms and shapes: parents, children, friends, lovers.
Thrown apart in space and time, stories in this book don’t follow a straight timeline, creating a kaleidoscope of events that resembles the flow of life itself: colorful, dynamic, oftentimes misunderstood and confusing, but nonetheless beautiful at the end. “Hodgepodge” is inspired by people and challenges that occur within relationships; it follows the journey of a girl who struggles with her sexuality, alcohol and drug addiction, and desperate need for approval from men.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796097221

Valentina Romanova

Valentina Romanova was born and raised on the South-East border of Russia. She moved to Canada where she still currently resides when she was 18-years-old in a pursuit of a better life. Ever since she was little, Valentina dreamt of becoming a writer one day. “Hodgepodge” is her first published work.

Book preview

Freedom

Success is a progressive realization of a worthy ideal

Neil Nightingale

Freedom is my ideal. They say the first key to freedom is letting go. I let go of many things; at some point, I even considered it would be enough. How little did I know. How little do I know, still. Letting go is a never-ending process like waking up, or going to sleep. The sun rises, and the sun goes down. Things come our way; they lay on the shore brought in with the tide, and we can either collect the garbage for years or dispose of it. My friend told me that any good poker player discards 80% of his hands. Good deals are rare; if you spend too much time playing shitty ones, you will be out before you get a chance to play a good hand. I am not good at assessing the situation and getting rid of things that aren’t good enough. Mostly because everything and everyone is good enough for me. I am a garbage collector; I tried to play every hand I got, because what if…

Out of all the things I used to love about life, knowledge turned out to be the most traitorous one. When you love knowledge, you are webbed into this lie that knowledge DOES do good things for you; like helps you to become your better self.

Knowledge is an infinite resource; no matter how much you already know there is always more. The idea of getting all the possible knowledge or even all the knowledge you need in a very specialized niche is laughable. Information multiplies every day that I live; not only there are way too many things out there to learn as of right now, each day this library of information only gets bigger. I am a tiny speck in comparison to all the knowledge the world carries, unable to ever touch an edge of it.

Knowing, however, is different. Maybe there is a better word for it, but I will use this one as nothing describes better the feeling of… well, knowing. Knowledge is out there, acquired from the outer space, while KNOWING comes from within. Knowing comes without facts and logic and sometimes is irrational and even contradictory to knowledge. Knowledge is science. Knowing is faith.

Something had happened to me when I met A-a. What a beautiful name he has, A-a.; too bad I can’t tell you. Thought of giving him a fake name makes me cringe. Sharing his real name seems unfair; he never gave me permission to do so.

I did not know his name was unisex. It is not just a rare unisex name; it - more often than not – belongs to a girl. That is so funny because I attributed to him all the qualities that a real man should possess. It was not until later that I realized a lot of those qualities are feminine. In a very traditional sense of this word.

I have always thought of myself as overly masculine for a girl. Not physically, or even mentally. Emotionally. The way I felt and processed emotions seemed masculine to me. There are both in each of us and the idea, I suppose, is to balance them out. I have to open up to my feelings, show what I feel. I have to erupt these emotions everywhere I go like a volcano. This means if I am angry, I have to be angry aloud, not just inside my head. If I feel sad, I have to cry it out with people watching. If I am happy, I have to laugh and smile as much as I can to each and every stranger. I held my emotions under lock for the longest time. Mostly, because the majority of emotions I experienced were negative. Anger, frustration, fear… Once I felt love, everything has changed.

It is weird to say that I have not felt love until I was 22. Both of my parents loved me, how could I not feel it? Perhaps, when I was little I did, but the feeling was erased with time. All I remember from childhood is a sense of wonder and later feelings of betrayal, mistrust, and rejection. For the very first time in my conscious (memory accessible) life, I felt love with A-a. Perhaps, I did not feel it for the first time but remembered what it felt like. Since that moment all the way until now, and all the way into my future I have been trying, am trying, and will be trying to cultivate, multiply, and share this love.

I have spent countless nights missing him and wanting him to come back. Although this thought is still hard to bear, I should go on without him. He is alive, for sure; he is on this planet. If I am ever meant to see him again, I will. Yet nothing is saying that I must and that it will happen. Therefore, I must go on. He gave me the most important part that has been missing inside of me, and he does not have to be here to see it grow. He had woken up the hibernating sensation of love that I have carried in me all along. The love did not belong to him. It is mine, it is within me. He is the one who got through and touched it. It has been taking slow and shallow breaths for the last little while… perhaps, even going back to sleep at times. Yet the sensation is too vivid for me to forget it now. At any point, I can reach my own hand and touch it, awaken it, bring it back to my life.

This is what I need to do. I need to do it NOW. I have waited for a miracle for freaking 2 years (that’s a lie; just year and a bit, I rounded it up to be more dramatic). I have cried so many tears that I am starting to feel disgusted with myself for inability to be grateful and satisfied with what I have. I don’t have him, is what I am crying about. What I need to understand is that I have the love for him, which is permanent. I can hide it, and make myself feel even sicker, or I can look the truth in the eyes: it is love. I know it is.

The fact that it is love is the knowing I am talking about. It is when you look in someone else’s eyes and you just KNOW.

In the moments that we touched (literally and metaphorically speaking), I didn’t just love the way he made me feel. I loved the way I and my life were. I loved everything in it, myself included. The only suspicion I have here is that I didn’t love myself enough. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have chickened out of telling him how I truly felt. I wrote it instead of saying. I do better with a written word than a spoken one. Fear of speaking has always been my worst enemy. It follows me nearly every step that I make, especially lately. Lately, I feel fear stepping on my heels. Fear of being judged, fear of being rejected, fear of being abandoned, fear of being unworthy, fear of being not good enough. Where confidence used to be, now is a residence of fear. I closed up; I sank to the bottom of my soul and retired from trying to get up. I have forgotten the sensation of absolute freedom that love opened up for me.

*     *     *

As a person who wants to spread love, not hate I can sound a bit harsh sometimes.

I don’t want to shame people who have genuine intention to help others, although people who are capable of help would not get offended at my words. When you do something for the deeper purpose that you feel on the inside of you, outside world and its inhabitants can’t steer you away from your direction, neither can they cause a storm aboard. It is only when the foundation is shaky, then someone else’s words can cause negative emotions to unfold. Anger, sadness, fear – all of these emotions come from within. If you pride yourself on helping others, you must be able to contain your own negative emotions and only project what you want others to feel. In this case, love. Otherwise, why would you help? If you have a lot of residue anger inside, perhaps, the first step is to GET HELP.

Sometimes even when you are content, the smallest things can throw you off balance. Coffee too bitter? Oh, no, I can already taste this day getting shittier. Some of us are prone to negative thinking. Another scenario is super sensitive people, the ones who are very perceptive to the emotional states of others. These people usually try to help. These people fail at it a lot because other’s negativity is contagious.

When I moved from Toronto to Sun Peaks village (a ski resort in British Columbia, four hours drive away from Vancouver) I was looking for a change. I was desperate for a change. I was going to spend time in quiet of my home, enjoy nature, and work on my writing. Instead, I drank my days away at the pub and hooked up with guys. Not that much different from what I did in Toronto.

I missed the city, but I also felt in the same trap of partying all the time and it was the opposite of what I wanted, so I bought a mini-van, packed it with my humble belongings and drove to Vancouver where I had one friend. One is better than nothing. I got a job at the Grouse Mountain; not Sun Peaks, but I have never skied in my life, so it was a good starting playground for me. For the first month or so I didn’t have a place to stay in Vancouver. I couch-surfed and then slept in the car, parked on the side of the road near Walmart. I got a gym membership at the same plaza, and that was where I showered. A food court is where I had breakfast; Walmart’s public washroom is where I brushed my teeth. These December days were fun.

I do have bad timing, after all. Who decides to be homeless in the middle of winter? The thing is if you have lived your whole life in between Russia and Toronto, Vancouver’s winter feels like mild fall, at most. I mean, it did not get below zero degrees Celsius most days, and it rained a lot. In December. What kind of winter is that?

I was lucky to get a place before the first real snow appeared. I stayed in North Van, closer to the mountain I got a job on, so when snow fell, it covered everything. Vancouver, which is only 10 min sea bus away from North Van barely ever got white.

How crazy is that, they have a SEA BUS. It is this giant boat that carries hundreds of people from North Van to downtown Vancouver. I mean, you can take a long way around with the bridge and everything… but why would you ever do that, when there is a sea bus every 10 minutes? I actually miss living in British Columbia a bit. I haven’t been to that many places yet, which will hopefully improve once you guys read my book and I get rich and famous (a girl can dream, right?), but BC is without a doubt the most beautiful place I’ve been to. Wild nature of Sun Peaks, deserted Kamloops, the most picturesque drives… I suppose it is the mountains that you can see from anywhere and beautiful always-green pine trees that make BC so attractive.

West Coast is the first place where I have seen mountains. Real, tall, snow-covered peaky mountains. I cannot describe the feeling you get in the mountains. You feel small, as you always do in a face of something so vast. Yet, it is not a pitiful feeling; it is the good kind of small. It is the I am a part of something bigger kind of small. It the KNOWING that there are things BIGGER than me, and bigger than the whole humanity; and those things are beautiful. It is the feeling that I miss so much here, in concrete jungles of Toronto. It is the feeling I have to remind myself of.

Here, in the city, all you ever see is man-made. Even nature is carefully scheduled within the open windows. We got trees, where there is a place for trees. North Vancouver has a feel that it is built around nature. Toronto is built despite it. When everything around you is man-made, you start to forget how you got here in the first place. You witness human’s success and accomplishments in every