From "Love, šaltibarščiai and red tomatoes" - The black days

Her favorite place in the house was the kitchen. In the kitchen she spent her days: she read, she prepared the dinner, she made calls, she wrote emails, she worked and cried, she laughed and thought.
In the kitchen we made love, often.
The kitchen was full of her self unlike any other part of the house.
There (in the kitchen) she had erected her inner sanctuary, fortified her self and learned to esteem and trust in herself or how pleasurable was to torture herself on questions that could not be answered.
She never wanted to share that space even with me.
She housed me in that space but it remained exclusively hers.

From every other space she excluded me in the black days of menstruation. Who was in those days the hidden Demiurge that broke the world and the space surrounding her? Did that Spirit decide for her and spoke for her?
In those days it seemed that every thought of her mind had already been decided in spite of her will . Her thoughts no longer were direct to me but aimed to the depths of her own self unable to decipher any kind of reason.
Those were the days when she once again savoured a childhood in which she had never decided anything.

- My childhood in Klaipeda was very poor, I lived in a house without heating. The temperature that was outside was inside. There was almost nothing to eat. The best dish my mother served was šaltibarščiai. This is why I still love this soup. It's the taste of my poor childhood.
I could see from her eyes that still kept tracks of it.
It seemed  like a childhood that has never passed whenever she ate šaltibarščiai.
I wondered what I loved in those days that menstruation altered Austėja's perceptive state.
I didn't see perfection, I was madly in love but I did not see perfection in her.

I could solely imagine her life as a prelude to a search just made of fatigue that was trying to find a direction. But it was life indeed, an intense desire to live that I realized was not denying life itself, despite her claim to be desperate.
As Ričardas gavelis says in Vilniaus Pokeris "In days like these, lighter things weigh more than heavy and [...] show directions for which there is no name".