Journeys inside myself

In Spring 2015 I had 14 days to spend in the Residence of a young author in Vilnius, to write poems and prose, to work on my translations of Charles Bukowski and Langston Hughes. I didn’t have any schedule except my personal one, which meant I could spend as much time as I wanted wandering around the Old Town and wondering.
Vilnius Old Town consists of 108 streets and when you first get there you don’t expect there is a system, but it turns out there is, it’s a living being that can read one’s thoughts and lead one the right way either to questions or to answers. One could never get lost there, though to get lost in Vilnius is the best that can happen to a searching soul.
I saw Vilnius surrealistic, it seemed that we both were sleeping and seeing one and the same dream and I enjoyed it to the full. As I was alone there, I had nobody to talk to and to prevent me from listening to the Old Town fairy-tales, from seeing the shadows of the prominent people who changed the flow of history, from touching its stones that were speaking with me, from thinking it all over.
Vilnius is famous for its neighborhood called Užupis, this district, named Republic and compared with Montmartre in Paris, has its own constitution in 15 languages. There are funny articles like “Everyone has the right to die, but this is not an obligation” and more serious, connected with the history of Lithuanian independence: “Everyone is responsible for their freedom”. But my favourite is the motto “Do not defeat, Do not fight back, Do not surrender”, as it means observing, sitting at the river bank and absorbing the world around, without intervening. That was what I actually did. I went to the river Vilnia, which, according to the Constitution of the Republic of Užupis, “has the right to flow by everyone”, sat by the water and started observing.
I was sitting and waiting for the corps of my enemy to pass along the river. It didn’t. There passed a plastic bottle, a log of wood, a duck followed by a drake. They swam against the stream, then back, pulled it up, tried again, then returned to restore on the stones. It seemed to be lasting forever…
The previous day, week, all the things I had lost passed along the river but the corps of my enemy never appeared. I was happy, happy to have no enemies.
Užupis was singing with its painted leaves and I woke up while Vilnius is still sleeping.