Flee

When I left for university, I resolved to leave behind everything that made me Lithuanian. I ditched religion. I had already had sex by then and I wasn’t married, so the loss wasn’t much for the Church. I left the food. I wanted stuff that was fried and spicy and I wanted to try peanut butter. I dropped my radically anticommunist mindset after a class required me to read Marx. Beginning of sophomore year, I dumped my Lithuanian boyfriend too.

Scrapping my pale-skinned blue-eyed partner marked a new era in my romantic life. As an archaeologist of my own dating patterns, I now call this chapter Anything but Blonde or Eastern European. A few hookups later—only one of them was European and even he came from the opposite side of the continent—I landed in another relationship.

My next partner was Vietnamese, Saigon-raised, British-educated, American-accented, and had spent the last 21 years of his life modeling his personality after classic Hollywood figures like Marlon Brando. He was also a leftist, a true leftist, the kind my mother warned me about when I left my sample-sized homeland for the Great Big Politically Diverse World. He snickered each time he called me Eastern European because I would immediately blurt out “Baltic”, and he never grew tired of defending communism because the regime that exiled my grandparents was “not that, it was Sovietism.” Within a month of dating, I believed my kin suffered from a collective psychosis. I was convinced that the name “Baltic” was a result of a nationalist fantasy. I thought the villainization of communism was a byproduct of selective memory—did they teach you about the land ownership of the exiled bourgeois? Their own violations of equity within the Union? I don’t know, did they? My family hardly talked about the exile at all. He peeled the last bits of my shedding Lithuanian skin. 

I was madly in love with him. So madly in love that I renounced my ultra feminist marriage-is-a-corrupt-institution persona in hopes of one day sharing a last name, even if the slightest mention of marriage led to the biggest of our arguments. Needless to say, the breakup broke me.

My rebound boy differed from the Leftist in nearly every way possible. There was no way I could compare his thin arms to the Leftist’s bulky shoulders; the semester before he had led a campus money laundering business. My ex would’ve surely sent him to exile; when I asked him for a drink the boy stared at a shy bottle of Campari. I told myself it was a refreshing change from the previous man’s obsession with fine-crafted cocktails, even if I still craved sugar rimmed martinis. But my rebound boy was Asian and had an American accent, so I kept returning to his room just to hear his voice in the dark. I never forgot that he wasn’t my ex, but my ex felt less absent when I lay in his bed.

Then followed the late night swiping. I hopped on every dating app—all two of them—and resorted to swiping any time my chest felt tight or I focused too much on my breath and started gasping for air. Therapeutic psychologists would call my Tinder-rummaging a “grounding” technique: anytime you feel yourself slipping away, you’re supposed to shock your system back into reality. The classic guide will urge you to use an ice cube, pierce your skin with the sharp cold to jolt yourself out of the dissociated state. In my case, you stare at overly curated profiles of self-proclaimed photographers until you no longer feel the absence of muscular arms around you.

I figured something was up when my best friend began sending links to East Asian profiles with such notes as, “Seems like your guy!” A few months into my hoe phase, I had gone out with: a Korean guy raised in Fiji, another Korean guy raised in Abu Dhabi, a Korean-Lebanese man who ended up being a jerk, a Japanese boy, a Canadian whose parents immigrated from Hong Kong, and a Vietnamese-Indian influencer who unfollowed me after a day without texting. Some of them reminded me of how I hoped my husband would look at me, even if they didn’t know shit about Leninism and Stalinism.

“You can’t always politicize your love,” my Korean best friend silenced my worries of developing a fetish. I knew I was scavenging for reminders of my ex. My friend assured me I was entitled to my grief, even if it came in the form of a white girl chasing after Asian men. We joked about us dating each other’s brothers: while she forwarded me Korean guys’ Tinder accounts, I assessed the white boys lurking in her DMs, even if they made me gag. 

Relatives have always expected me to marry a fellow blue-eyed Lithuanian. Days before I left, my grandmother said, only half jokingly, that she does not want dark-skinned children. “I’ll marry a Pole then,” I replied with quick wit. My parents’ laughter was laced with concern.

When it comes to my parents, fear of the unknown has always towered over them like a concrete wall. I don’t mean to say they aren’t adventurous. Since the Independence, they both have swirled through Europe, have tried and fallen in love with escargot, and once considered buying an apartment in London. But exploring is only fun so long as it is temporary; wherever they travel, the wall travels with them. If you listened to them talk, you’d hear the word užsienyje—abroad—at least seven times regardless of the topic. Shrouded in fascination and vigilance, that word rarely refers to areas outside of Lithuania’s borders; it carries the implication of a land where Russian was never forced upon as an official language. They mock American beauty standards and German practicality. Scandinavia, to them, is a socialist fever dream. Beneath that lies the belief that these people function radically differently from us—even if they spoke a mutual language, they would have never discussed the occupation with my ex, or with anyone who wasn’t behind the Iron Curtain with them. When I told my mother about Tiananmen Square, she urged me to study more Lithuanian history.

We started making brief annual trips to London when I was eight. Banking on my few years of learning English, they let me roam alone; while they chatted with a Lithuanian waitress at our hotel, I dashed for Chinatown. I scouted bodegas in search of green tea ice cream mochi and onigiri—the triangular sticky rice sandwiches all my favorite cartoon characters relished. I was delighted to discover a taiyaki bakery churning out fish-shaped waffles with matcha cream oozing out of their gaping mouths. Not only could you not find this stuff in Lithuania, Lithuanians could not even dream of their existence. I was intrigued and I was fearless: the kind of mix that leads kids in fairytales to either conquer the world or simmer away in the pot of a local witch. 

My parents may have been less scared than envious of my curiosity in the world. My aunt who sings folk war songs after a glass of whiskey once confessed that she can’t trust the large world. She had tried to embrace it—to find belonging outside of our pine-tree lined horizons, but discovered that her body felt too frail. Yet she rejoiced in my cousins’ English fluency, perhaps even more so because they still lived in our hometown.

The week Putin invaded Ukraine, my bedroom ceiling morphed into a see-through veil. I craved a rational response, like guilt over being safe while the same people that had faced tanks 30 years ago stared down the barrel again. I strained to purify my rage for the lives lost. I convinced myself I was furious over ambushed humanitarian corridors.

The reality is, for days I cowered at the sound of passing Etihad planes. The safety I had taken for granted, my passport—all of it felt less like a right and more like chance. There was no distraction that could appease me without ripping out my core. In the office, my supervisor offered to change the background TV channel. I stammered that staying updated was my source of relief. I typed my assignments with Euronews streaming in the background—muted, but never out of sight. I wondered if I’d talk about this moment for years to come.

After my parents divorced, my mother and I moved into her childhood bedroom. When my mother was 14, she had followed the radio broadcast of Lithuania’s last invasion in the same bedroom. I often imagined her waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of sirens, flipping through idle TV channels while trucks loaded with loudspeakers lied about the national government conceding. Whenever she told me the story, she marveled at her instinct to put on the radio. I used to find that detail absurd.

I don’t recall ever formally learning about the events of January 13, 1991: the last time Russian tanks invaded Lithuania. I only knew there was a night when people shielded TV towers with their bodies, but like the rest of Lithuanian youth, I was expected to know them inherently. As I began writing this essay, I finally read the history records.

In 1989 my homeland solidified its role as the splinter in the USSR’s butt by declaring sovereignty; in 1990 it asserted the title by formally ditching the word Soviet from The Republic of Lithuania. In response, Gorbachev’s government hiked food export prices to the Baltics—raise the price of bread and a revolution shall begin, isn’t that classy? At the beginning of 1991, strategically planted dissidents began protests. The slogans were in Russian. Ministries across the USSR began drafting young men into the Union’s army. Days later, barely adult Lithuanian lads received mandates to join the Soviet forces. The same day Armed Soviet Units made their way towards the capital. Gorbachev pledged to protect the Russophone minority in Lithuania.

Listen, this is 1991—don’t drift to 2014. 

January 8. Dissident groups hold a bogus protest against price hikes. They storm the parliament. In a special TV and radio broadcast, the Lithuanian Parliament Chairman asks people to protect critical infrastructure. Bankers and bakers flock to TV towers and railway stations.

January 10. Gorbachev declares a military mission in the salvation of Lithuania, demanding for anticonstitutional laws to be revoked and for the USSR constitution to be restored. You with me? Lithuania.

Over 20,000 citizens encircle the capital’s TV tower. Crowds of commoners shield key governmental buildings across the country. Soldiers open fire into the crowds. Main TV channels go down. The Press House falls. Soviet troops attempt to plow through Lithuanians, but Lithuanians have brought barbed wire and concrete walls.

People are crushed. Tanks are stuck. I forgot to mention, it’s January 13. We don’t ask which cities have fallen. Loudspeakers on the streets announce that, “the Nationalist and separatist government has been overthrown. It is time to return home.” We don’t budge.

A small studio goes on air in Kaunas: my hometown. An open call for help from translators. Within an hour the studio is crowded with professors broadcasting the invasion in tens of languages. Swedish media pick it up. Can you believe I grew up thinking all this happened in one night? Norway appeals to the UN on behalf of Lithuania. The sample-sized pine-tree-filled country now has backup.

Until now I had thought the invasion had ended that night. I couldn’t tell how. Turns out, during the rest of January, Soviet troops formed checkpoints around major Lithuanian cities. Young men began disappearing. So did historical records.

Somehow, by the end of the year, Lithuania was a member of the UN; a new war was waged in Iraq, and my mother entered high school. Fast forward to her forties, she has a daughter and a heart still bursting with national pride.

Lithuanians have so many independence days in a year that I often lose track. When I quarantined at my late grandmother’s house in 2020, I forgot to raise the flag on July 6th. My mother blamed it on the Americans and the Leftists for completely corrupting her daughter. This became her go-to conflict starter. Auguste, Black Lives Matter is a communist organization. Don’t let them fool you.

Since leaving for university, I often felt as though I was ping ponged between the grip of The Lithuanians (read: my parents, my singing aunts, my history teachers, the lady at a fruit stall who prophesied I would become the next president, and the bookstores where Marx is banned) and The Americans (read: the Leftists, the Communists, the Propagandists, the Capitalists, and the Russians). I envied my classmates for their Cool Liberal Parents who posted Facebook selfies with rainbow filters and flags of solidarity. I cringed every time mother talked about my eventual return to Lithuania.

I shrank each day that Putin’s military occupation of Ukraine continued. With time I grew angry, then heartbroken, then disappointed, exhausted, then furious again. I spent days crafting sunflower badges, plastering flyers across campus with Slava Ukraini spelled out thrice, and singing along to Lithuanian folk songs I had tried to forget.

You see, I have never experienced homesickness, only sickness of home. If my stance ever wavered, I pulled up Lithuanian articles detailing how the idea of mental illnesses covered up laziness. I felt accomplished when I began dreaming in English. Now, the voices of four women lamenting a fallen birch tree blasted directly into my eardrums—by choice—and I was no longer thinking of forests but of murdered Ukrainian soldiers. I’m embarrassed when I find traces of my mother in me, yet I still watch Kyiv’s bombings in my bedroom at night.

These nights, I fight the impulse to catch the first flight to Europe and make my way to Ukraine, or the Polish-Ukrainian border, or home. But I can’t, so a few weeks ago I did the next best thing: I drove to Lithuania’s pavilion at the Dubai Expo. I toured the humble room with a freshly gained appreciation for nondescript slabs of amber, bottled samples of water, and for the signature Meek Lithuanian Eye Contact I made with other visitors. I dragged a German friend along, swearing that I needed to hear spoken Lithuanian for my own sanity. We lingered in front of twirling carbonated water bottles until a tall blonde woman approached us. She addressed my friend first, who, admittedly, is blonder than me.

“Are you with the delegation?” she inquired in Lithuanian. “Oh no, we are from Abu Dhabi,” I replied with calculated enthusiasm. “I moved there four years ago for university. It’s a satellite campus of NYU: a phenomenal school.” The woman stared at me without even a commercial smile. “We are closing,” she stated. “I’ll need you to leave.”

On the highway back to Abu Dhabi my friend asked what the lady had said. She laughed. “This is why I left,” I sneered, but for a moment a part of me felt secure.

As I’m writing this in May, I no longer scout Tinder for Asian men. I’m back to mostly blasting English and Arabic indie beats, but every now and then a Lithuanian song will come up, and I will pause at the instinct to skip it. In two weeks I’ll be flying home with my best friend. I worry about the remarks I may overhear from people who have never seen a Korean. But I’m excited for her to try strawberry milk soup, to lie deep inside a pine tree forest, and marvel together at how seamlessly the birch trees blend in.

Image courtesy of the author

Augusté Nomekaité is a photographer, filmmaker, and intermittent writer living in Abu Dhabi, UAE. She was born in Lithuania, colloquially known as the land of rain. At the age of eight she borrowed her father’s point and shoot; ten years later she moved to the UAE to pursue a B.A. in Film and New Media at New York University Abu Dhabi. Since then she has deepened her passion for affective media, nonlinear forms of tale-telling, and intangible emotions. Her works are threaded with curiosity for the female gaze, illness, violent forms of affection, and ecology. Follow her on Instagram @avgustite