I am of Russian blood—  blood crimson as the lucent poppies freckling the everlasting fields of barley, blood ivory as the snowdrift delicately dotting the landscape of sempiternal wintertide. 

My hair is of the flaxen wheat the peasants sowed; my hands are rough, perpetually tainted red from beets and carrots. 

Peel back my layers, and find my stomach quenched with vermillion borscht, ruby potatoes sloshing amongst the carrots, and onions, and cabbage.  

Thrust my eyes from their binding lids, and you will espy a relentless hue of frosted cerulean, blue as the clouds’ salty tears unleashed upon the loamy soil, replenishing the crop and farmland.  

Upon search, the depths of my closet reveal ashen fur ushankas and brightly colored floral sarafans, brusquely stuffed between my faded mom jeans and Hollister hoodies.   

Glance at my name, and questions will effervesce uncontrollably to your lips, quivering with eagerness, aching with desire— “how do you pronounce “Hromcenco”?”  

As a youth, a simple child of naivety, my voice once betrayed subtle, minute tones; strange pitches, foreign to the English ear. My chords became my enemy, my vocals bitter traitors. I longed to conceal my inflection, to bury my unorthodox diction under piles of American novels and cliche 80s comedies and miniature liberty bells. 

Now, my speech is blanketed, a thick heavy duvet concealing its once piquant modulations, so unfamiliar to my native companions.  

I once yearned to share with friends my other, disparate part of life; I craved to reveal the distinct realm I entered upon walking through my back door. 

The concealed world, hidden from view— the world teeming with multfilmi and old soviet movies; the world chock-full of enticing novellas and vivid folktales of baba yagas; the world eternally infused with the aroma of meatball soup and comforting kasha. 

The sentience that exists exclusively on an edge— a split between the melancholy, bittersweet past, and the picturesque memories of benevolence I hold so dear. 

The egregious antiquities of our people’s suffering, the abhorrent distress and pain that stings me as a needle; yet my classmates, they joke, without fathoming the hurt of their words. 

They hiss, “Russia hacked the election!” 

I hear their erring phrases— snaking vipers, slithering noiselessly into my mind, “...Russian spies…” “...filthy commies…”    

I am of Russian blood. 

Of  undying passion, of regal nobility, of mysteries and farmland and sweet cherry summers. I am of pain and suffering unmatched, followed by generations of grave oppression; I am of fallacies and hidden truths, shrouded with censures. I am of a nation vast and stretching, its grasps reaching far beyond its borders. I am of beauty and resilience, of winters biting and sharp, of racing rivulets hidden deep within the woods.

My blood ascends above their pitiful insults— for it is ethereal, and holy. A millennia of tribulations it has faced.