anastasiawrites

•

Daily excerpts from a Dostoevskian girl

January 12, 2026

I have nothing. I have everything. I am a pessimist, and an optimist. I hate more than I love. But I love the inanimacy of the everyday more than I hate. I do not pride myself on having been through the worst. I don’t want to hear about what happened to you. I know no one cares what’s happened to me. I am indifferent. I am so feeling it stirs me awake. The world is too cruel. The world is so full of love. I will go to hell. But for the right reasons. I am all-consuming. I let everything consume me.

Burn my books, throw them in the trash, take down my paintings, rip up my drawings. My goal is to create art so impactful that it is destroyed because it exists. And everyday I try to love. Everyday I fail in everything but myself. This love I hold, I’m afraid, is not meant for humanity. It is bigger than that.

And you wonder why, despite your efforts, bad things continue to happen. And I said it is because good people attract the worst because the worst sees it as a challenge. And you said that that’s not the way it should be. And I said I know. And you said that bad people should find bad people. And I said maybe we should be bad people, just once. And you said no, because then you’d end up in hell. 

And that was that.

Anastasia Stetsko's avatar by Anastasia Stetsko

January 10, 2026


I stood there, the northern breeze ruffling my skirts and sending a chill up my spine. I refused the cigarette passed to me with a quick shake of my head and went out into the courtyard, the bells now deafening. But their dissonance did not dissuade me from reaching the centre, and there, amid the crosshatch of pathways, the flora slightly less emaciated in the sunlight, I closed my eyes, searching for a whisper in the wind. I was burning, burning, burning. The clink of wineglasses over the garden walls, the reciting of Dante’s Comedy, the laughter of children in the square, and the clang of the bells in the tower now concealing my sunlight, it came back to me. It swirled round me, turned me over in my dreams. 

And then I woke up in Montréal. Propping myself up on an elbow, I stared out at the snow and the clamour of eight a.m. streets, a siren somewhere in the distance, a buzz of overhead lights, the viciousness of winter subduing my reverie as I choked down reality.  

Why won’t it slow down?

Anastasia Stetsko's avatar by Anastasia Stetsko

January 9, 2026

I never liked sitting on the side waiting for life to happen to me. Besides, all love which prospers has at one point suffered unspeakable distance. Sometimes I will be convincing myself of impossible things, and other times impossibilities will convince me, but behind all that there lies the subtle humiliation in waiting for anything. Do not mistake me, my mind does not lay idle.

You know you should be out there. You stay in anyway, and December comes. You tell yourself you’ll wait for spring once more. But nothing ever changes. We are awaiting the grace of gods unseen.

Anastasia Stetsko's avatar by Anastasia Stetsko