Paper World

Cardboard houses painted in fading hues blur past, mingling with pencil-thin poles.

Corrugated-paper roofs, brushed in autumn’s palette.

Little paper-cut people in scarves far too long, in mismatched, bright shoes clipped from the pages of glossy magazines.

Wisps of cigarette smoke, like tiny white clouds drifting aimlessly.

Birds — no more than checkmarks — sketched in black ink across a watercolor sky.

A collage of colors beyond the smooth pane of the tram window — like a picture on a television screen. Like a private escape hatch from reality. A thin wall to keep it all at bay.

Like a guilty cat, I slipped into the clattering tram and tucked myself away from the world. Inside this metal shell, rolling carelessly over rails, tossing sparks at the paper people below… there was an illusion of safety in its narrow space.

With my cold nose buried in my palms, I studied the paper world I’d conjured — one that now seemed far too fragile, far too unsteady, far too small to spend my nerves on. Those pitiful scraps of color.

On the meaningless, noisy bustle. On those paper-round faces, cut from newspapers, wearing stern stares and drawn-on brows…

Foolish.

It’s foolish to grieve for a paper world that could wilt in a drizzle. To place hope in cardboard towers that would crumble at the brush of a breath. To trust in painted backdrops set like traps, with nothing at all behind them.

How can it be?

The world is make-believe — and yet the sorrow inside it is real.

*written 25.10.2013 Бумажный мир - Snow's

*translated to Eng 13.08.2025