A Clean Slate

Russia's a very strange place. It can alienate you, make life difficult for you, make you regret you ever heard about it. But once you're gone, Russia has an even more strange way of staying on your mind. For the past year since my return, I've been casting off the little things about Russia and Moscow that had crept into my life. It's been a slow motion ceremony of closure. This weekend I took one of the last, and perhaps most obvious, measures; I shaved off the beard I had grown while on the road in Siberia.

The beard was born from a lack of hot water and otherwise inconvenient accommodations while I was travelling in April and May last year. It certainly wasn't my style - I have never gone more than a day or two without shaving - but it somehow ended up fitting my image of myself. It was a semi-romantic notion I had about a russophile trekking across the great unknown spaces of Eurasia, on his own with his wit to survive. Of course, reality was a little bit different. I sipped tea on comfortable trains, went to ballets and operas, and never really lacked for anything. As far as travel goes, it was on the low end of adventure and not on the hardship scale at all.

Reality began to set in slowly when I returned. I liked the beard and thought it looked pretty good. But having a beard is an active commitment - the trimming, the daily careful shaving around it, etc. It became apparent that the maintenance aspect was an unseen cost of the rather passive decision to grow the thing in the first place. It no longer really made any sense to me.

So, I lathered up my shaving brush with a beautiful sandalwood soap and shaved my entire face for the first time since mid April 2006. It was a satisfying experience - the smell, the sensation, the scratching sound of the razor. When I rinsed off the suds and looked at myself in the mirror I was startled by the change.

I suppose I look the same now as I always did for all that time that I didn't have a beard at all. But then, how could that be possible? All the things I had seen and done in the meantime have surely made me a different person. And now, in that brief moment in the mirror, it seemed that all my experiences had been stripped from me, negated and washed down the drain.

Of course, that's a rather poetic overreaction. But for a flash, it seemed like I had turned the clock back 14 months. Of course, memories and experiences don't even need physical form to seem real to us. And, I have my blog and wonderful photo albums to recall my time abroad. So there was certainly no need to feel that shaving my beard from Russia had in any way distanced me from that time in my life.

I came back to my senses and had a little laugh in the solitude of my bathroom. After all, everything was exactly the same. And it was all extremely different.

Arms Length Self Portraits