Beating

It's been almost fifteen years since I lived in Belarus. It's funny, but before even the people, it's summer I remember best. Like God dipped all the leaves in deep green paint, and the wind is spring all the way through August, cool and new life's herald.

You think it'd be winter that I remember. Where after the first snow fall you would only see the ground when weeks-long winds erased the white down to the gray dirt. Out the train windows, white birch faded in and out of the snowfog. And it was cold. Really, really, freaking cold.

But in summer, the rain felt like it belonged in the air, and after it finished falling the mud was snow's cousin: you walked cautious and didn't drive in the country.

But after summer, in my mind, it is the people that stick with me. Ex-pats like Lisa and DeeDee and Nathan and the Laughlins. And Belarussians like Andrei Andreyev.

Andrei lived three doors down from me, on the ground floor, on the right. Next to the walkway under the Karbisheva 7, our building. I have so many regrets from our friendship. Yeah, we lit off fireworks, and played video games together, and I taught him baseball. But I never learned his language, even though I spent two years in his country. And there were so many freaking times I told him to come back and play zaftra even though I'd told him the same thing the day before. The worst of it is that I have a letter of his somewhere. I had a friend translate it. And in the letter, he gives his address five or six times. That first summer back turned into my first year of high school, and that turned into the following summer, and I always found good reasons to put off writing him back. If there's anything in my life I regret it's not writing Andrei.

I' m sure he went into the military. Everybody does there. I remember he went to church with his grandmother. I hope he found a church later. He once offered me sausage and I thought it was gross and politely declined. I remember his apartment was always dark, but you could always see the motes drifting in the air.

More than once I've dreamed of meeting him and apologizing. The first time I went back to Belarus, all I wanted to do was hop on the tramvai from the Komorovski market and head up to Zyeloni Lug, and knock on the door. He would open the door, and I would say, "Eta ya." Which was something he always used to say as a self-deprecating joke for some reason. And then I would say, "Ya durak." And we would be friends again. But that never happened. Even the whole summer I spent there, I never even got back up in that area. Never stepped of the 1 or the 3 tramvai and walked across the green meadow park with the concrete waterfall you could see from our window before we put up the satellite dish. Past the place where Amanda got hit by that car and ran home on adrenaline and didn't walk for a month. Past the place where that drunk guy started beating me up until he found out I was an American, and then let me go and gave me a hug. Past the merry-go-round where Juliet cracked open her skull and the blood splattered on the elevator, and she didn't know, and Amanda didn't tell her when she asked.

I used to really have this problem where there would be this thing that I wanted to do, or wanted to be, and there would be no good reason not to, and I wouldn't. And Andrei's a great example. But it could be picking up my socks or asking a girl out, or doing my homework, or remembering to call someone I said I would, or floss, or take medicine, or eat less. Anything beneficial. It was part laziness, and part the fact that I liked seeing things go wrong. I liked the randomness. The feeling of knowing I caused something to fail. Maybe I liked the control.

I've gotten beyond that in a lot of ways. And I can only attribute my desire to actually get up and want to do things that I don't want to do to following Jesus. I know it sounds hokey to some of you, but I can point back to a very specific time where I spent hours a day listening to sermons and thinking about God, and spontaneously, out of that time, I started to want to do. To want to clean the house, or make the phone call that I needed to, or lose weight.

Lately, I've felt that desire to not do coming back.

And I think I rode the wave of good feelings for too long without actually bucking down and disciplining myself to do. So this year, for Lent, our church is going through some spiritual practices. Disciplines if you will. One for each week. I'm going to do them all, each week as they come. Plan out a way to make it work. Because I don't want to see another Andrei happen to me. I can't take that again.