Frida Kahlo Couldn't Dream

My friend is an artist. She paints these large-scale acrylic abstractions. Four years ago I walked into her apartment in New York, laid down comfortably on a massage table she had placed next to one of her artworks and let her tattoo my face. The procedure took a couple of hours. Sharp needles tickled my forehead, injecting color in between of eyebrows hair. I loved the result: my silent films 1920s face has been transformed into a dark-framed 2020s feature.

Painting & permanent brows make-up by Anna Nareiko

In two years the paint has faded, and I had to go & tattoo my brows again. In a professional world of permanent make-up it’s called “touch-up”. This time it was in a SPA setting, my eyebrows masteritza was tired of New York and was getting ready to leave. If you told me back then that I will fly all the way to St Augustine, Florida in 2024 to tattoo my eyebrows, I would’ve probably laughed. I still am.

O, du lieber Augustin (oh, dear Augustine)

Augustin, Augustin,

Mädl ist weg, Mädl ist weg (Girl is Gone)

But my eyebrows are back in place! Oh, Augustine*. And what will you do for the beauty?

Her name is Anna Nareiko and her art is permanently on my face.

Thank you, Ms. Artist. Frida Kahlo couldn't even dream.

A Conflict Of Interests

As you might know, 🇷🇺 white-blue-red tricolor belongs to Russia. Thanks to a never ending “special operation” activity in Far Fur Lands of medved, samovar and vodka right now, we have a news machine disaster non-stop creating content for tripped out Pinky Putin & Vova Brain reality-show episodes. American citizens cover production costs, but reasonably raise many questions as they have no idea who is in charge of this weird project. Perhaps, AI.

As a result, my controlling and curious mind keeps introducing me to a wonderfully sabotaging idea of “going back to my country to check myself”.

Who knows, maybe they all just sit together with Xi Jinping in Kremlin and meditate without me?

“But you can’t go!” - annoyed and depressed Woody Allen’ character exclaims in my head. This гундосing-пиндосing inner voice is always right.

In my motherland, you see, I’ll be considered a “foreign agent”. That sounds like a lot of trouble I don’t need (but subconsciously really want to experience).

I notice little details around me obsessively and I force my sacred meanings onto them.

There was a white-blue-red appearance of a tiny candy wrapper flying in the air in front of my eyes in NYC park today. The weather turned windy earlier, and the fresh breeze from both rivers might’ve picked up this piece of trash tricolor. It looked alarming. The skies were bright white and cloudy, and the candy wrapper kept spinning in the air for a minute or two, shining. I thought of nukes.

Can they?