Welcome to Gaia! ::

I don't know if it's my recent block or the fact I saw a Quentin Tarantino movie, but my writing today has been hideously choppy. I don't get it. I am influenced by a lot of exterior stuff, but wanted to know if you were, too. So I'll post what I have so you can all cringe with me. It's so distorted and warped I can barely stand to keep from hitting the delete key. I'm so disgusted with my work lately.

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Three months, and snows had melted off the remainder of doubt on the peaks of my confusion. Something poetic, like that. It would suffice to the way I felt, surrounded by the cold tips of Swedish mountains that resonated in crystal spikes above the European springtime.
Three months, sheltered in the care of a farmer and his daughter, Katarina. Not eating, not sleeping if I could help it. Stomaching what I could of human food; foods I would have given all my rubles for if only I could given it to my family back home in Tynda. They were always on my mind, their presence not far. Not far enough so that three hundred thousand miles, or however far I had walked till my boots had given out and feet had bled, that I could forget them. Thoughts of David, of Tsilla, Rosa and Efim plagued my mind both day and night. I prayed, for what good it did. For mama, for papa--
But this is all too soon, too sudden and fast. Let me begin again.
It had been three months since my death. Three excruciating months in the cold wilderness, making my way through enemy territory and into the safety of sweet and neutral Sweden. Through torrid rivers and plunging falls--well, perhaps not so dramatic, but certainly very long and arduous. Dead to the world and to myself as well, as every step I took reminded me of the strange thirst in my throat and the bullets rattling around inside my ribs. Some had gotten stuck, you see, on my pursuit from war. Retreat is the more common term for it, I suppose. But no matter.
I had collapsed in the care of a Swedish milkmaid. Katarina Adalsteinn, a sweet girl with big blue eyes and fluffy brown hair. She found me half-delirious and dying (or so I thought, in my fever) hanging in a horse trough, trying to figure out why the water wouldn’t quench my thirst. Dismayed, she had brought me to her elderly father, Johann, to have a look at me. Neither of them had commented on my lack of pulse, so I did not know if they had noticed or bothered taking it. They managed to nurse me back to ‘health’ (a health that depended more on their cattle than their care; as I supped on the prior and merely rested on the latter) in exchange for assistance around the farm. It gave me time to think more on what had happened to me, which they questioned only once.
The reply I gave them was as much the truth as any: I was twenty-seven, a formerly conscripted Soviet with a large peasant family who knew very little Swedish (they were teaching me, kindly), some German and French, and mostly Russian. I had been shot by my own men in confusion of battle but had managed to keep going, hitching rides where I could along the way in order to reach a safe destination. I did not wish to return home (but I secretly did), and merely wanted to work to pay off my debt to them before going on my way. To America, I supposed. To wherever it would take me to find the woman who had changed me. Or saved me--damned me? It was all a blur; a confusing and horrific blur that tasted like gunpowder and stank like lead-littered blood.
But that was all behind me. The question was now how did I move on? One needed to live to move on, and I most certainly was not alive. Katarina tried to bring me on walks with her; but the sun hurt too much for me to bear for long periods of time. Instead, we satisfied each other’s curiosity of one another (a twenty-year-old girl to a twenty-seven-year-old…whatever I was; beast, I supposed) by reading together by firelight. She taught me Swedish as I taught her Russian. It was not quite living, but it certainly beat dying. Perhaps that’s what the woman who turned me had wanted me to know. To live after death--a gift? Not a curse. I did not know. I was scared.
Three months of non-life. It was bearable. I cleaned the stalls, cut wood, repaired what Johann was too aged to fix (though the stubborn goat never wanted to admit it), and began to feel as though perhaps I was worth something after all. Perhaps she--whoever she was, this...vampiress, or whatever they called them--had saved me for a reason.