I'm Going to Do It Differently Today...

We all change and grow, and so do our forms of self-expression. This excerpt from my third book, It's All About Love, which I'm currently working on, is probably the most surreal piece I have ever written. It's a dream, and it's supposed to wake the protagonist and the reader up to something greater than themselves, to make them truly, deeply happy, without any pretenses or masks that we usually wear. Anyway, I'll let you be the judges, and I hope you will enjoy reading this extract as much I enjoyed writing it :).

"Something and nothing in particular woke me up, and I opened my eyes, startled. The beige ceiling with not-very-appealing water stains—the unfortunate consequence of the last-year’s water leak at our neighbors’—was still the same, albeit with bursts of light popping up on its worn surface every now and then. Still caught between the dreamworld and reality, I stared at the bizarre glowing pattern, finally realizing that they were reflections of headlights cast by cars zooming past our apartment building through the jet-black night. I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand and let out a sweet, long yawn. How long was I asleep for? The room was so quiet, all I could hear was a soft tick-tock of the wall clock and my parents breathing peacefully in their sleep in the room next door. Our two-bedroom apartment, popularly referred to as Khrushchyovka, was located in a five-story panel building in the Russian city of Voronezh—one of many such buildings that were developed on the initiative of Nikita Khrushchev in the early 1960s. It was a very modest dwelling, but I had been incredibly happy there for the seventeen years I had lived there with my mom, dad and Nan. I spent my love-filled childhood years reading books, mainly by Alexander Dumas, Stendhal and Agatha Christie, learning foreign languages day and night, like my life depended on it, and watching South American soap operas with my Nan. I was an only child, but I never felt lonely. Even when all my school