that smell (Moscow)

The old elevator rattles and the doors lurch open. Inside our apartment I somehow feel taller. There is a smell of formaldehyde, like cutting those frogs open in tenth grade Biology class. The rooms feel dead, not like a tender museum of our things but empty, as if the only life in these rooms is born from us and in our absence they simply did not exist. I yank the door to the balcony open, thinking that smell will go away but it lingers deep in the pillows on the couch and the drapes. Sour, sad and chemical.

I think of random conversations I had in Ureki, mostly with taxi drivers who asked where I was from. I spoke to them in broken Russian, and they all said the same thing - Moscow, a cold place with cold people. Nothing seems to happen here, or change here. Sure, there may be a new sidewalk, a new supermarket, a fresh coat of paint on a crooked fence but the sense that this entire place is dead as well, a sort of sprawling, residential graveyard is hard to shake off. There is a slow walk of time in Moscow, like gravel crunching under a giant asphalt roller. It all gets crushed to nothing, lost under a thick layer of black tar.

The ocean, outside the windows for two weeks. The low roar of the waves at night. The stacks of clouds at dawn. The water sometimes green, sometimes blue, sometimes clear, sometimes foam and churl. The ocean, taken for granted so quickly and now so far away. A vacation that felt endless until we sat in the airport and squeezed into seats, climbing into the clouds and closing our eyes.