SOME THINGS IN LIFE shatter us into pieces. There’s nothing solid left. We become free-floating mosaics, like those icy rings surrounding Saturn and Neptune. When viewed at a distance, we almost look whole. Get a closer look and you can see the light between these diverse leftover chunks of soul, feelings and memory. They are suspended there in time.

This was the condition I found myself in while wandering through a strange place. The name of the place was Crown Heights, at least as far as I knew, but it looked a lot more like the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC. It had snowed for days and the landscape was thickly white. But the sun had come out and various soul brothers from the neighborhood were out catching some rays. I could tell they were soul brothers because they were all wearing leather jackets and sunglasses. Some of them built little nests out of snow and ice and sat back there, soaking up the sunshine on this January day. A few of them were jazz cats of the old school and were holding conversations about Miles Davis and the Coltrane Quartet.

I slipped inside a house nearby, which was surrounded by small children. They were Dutch or Danish. Blonde children with slight accents. They were building snow forts and having snowball fights. In the house, there were only more people coming in and out. Through a shadowy hallway, I was approached by Celeste, who I hadn’t seen in forever. She was wearing a white t-shirt and she looked as beautiful as ever. Jungles of redgold hair bobbing all over the place, plus those fierce and somewhat frightening blue eyes. She walked past me several times, ignoring me each time she came by, as if she was allergic to me. I tried my best to be invisible.

At last, Celeste looked up and said, “Why have you been such a jerk to me?” I hugged her at once and said, “I haven’t been a jerk. I just loved you.” “If you really loved me, you would be happy for me,” she said. “See how happy I am here!” “I am,” I said. “I am. But this is the kind of sadness that just never goes away.” I started to weep then. I wept so much, I soaked us in tears. Her shirt was all wet. It was embarrassing. There didn’t seem to be any remedy for these blues.

They were neverending.

RIKEN SUGGESTED I get in shape by running to the airport. We were going to do this Rocky style. He would ride a bike and supervise the run. There he was in his desert camouflage hiking gear. The bike was second hand. He had only paid €5 for it. He had related this to me with some typical understated pride. Riken the Japanese mountaineer was known far and wide for his thrift and his ability to subsist on under €20 per day, sometimes getting by only on a few cans of precooked lentils and boiled rice to survive. He carried herbs and spices in his pockets.

I wasn’t sure what airport I was running to, but in my mind it was JFK. Yet the terrain was unfamiliar. Perhaps Tallinn Airport was the real destination. Or even Tartu? The first 20 kilometers or so went smoothly. I ran down a slope by a school where children were out playing. Riken was up on his bike. “Steady,” he called out to me. “Steady.” I felt depressed when I reached the end of that road though. Only 20 kilometers and maybe 100 more at least to go.

It seemed like an impossible objective to accomplish. How would I ever make it there on foot?

Instead, I went into a diner by the roadside. There were some women inside, Klaudia among them. She was sitting in the back corner in a booth. I could barely see her, but went to sit with her and ordered a full breakfast with lots of black coffee. It was so dark, but I could make out her curly blonde hair, her red blouse. She was wearing some kind of necklace. I got closer to the necklace and began to study it. It looked like some kind of archaeological find. Could it be from the Ming Dynasty? Late 16th Century? “You know, if you’re going to get so close to me like that,” she said, “we might as well just take things all the way.” That’s how I wound up making love to Klaudia in the back of a diner in nowheresville. Klaudia smelled like breakfast.

Riken was outside all this time, standing stoically beside his bike, engrossed in meditation.

LATA FOUND ANOTHER LOVER, but he was doing it all wrong. His technique was off. I know because I watched them make love. He was on the surface a solid choice, in good shape, what women consider handsome. But his performance was suboptimal. Cut and dry. Same old, same old. Curiously, I was not jealous, probably because I never formed that kind of emotional attachment to her. Later, after they were done, we also made love. Lata was just insatiable.

Afterward, I went to visit Brynhild. I had a gift for her. It was something like a tapestry that had various declarations of affection written all over it. When I got to Brynhild’s house, she was sleeping. The idea of having any relationship with her seemed out of the question. She sat up in bed, beneath the blankets. Brynhild had aged since I was away. She seemed very confused.

Then Lata showed up. She told me to give her the gift. “I’m the one who came up with that template, that design,” she said, pulling on one end of it. “Give it to me, give it to me now,” she said. She was aggressive. That was a side of her that I had never found appealing. It kept me away. There was real hardness in her. “Give it here,” she said, tugging away. “Give it to me now.”

I’m not sure what happened after all of that. I could hear someone vacuuming out in the hall.

I WAS ROBBED outside of Veeriku Selver in Tartu. It happened just last night. There were three of them, but a ringleader, of course. I’m seldom violent, but the joke about “stealing his backpack” turned into a non-joke. I don’t remember what the other two of them looked like. One was thinner and had darker hair. The other one was chunky. The ringleader was named Andreas or some variant on the name Andrew. Only later, I recognized his physical similarity to Bree van de Kamp’s son from Desperate Housewives, whose name was also Andrew. But he was speaking Estonian. So I was robbed by Andrew van de Kamp’s Estonian doppelganger.

She, a lady of my life, was AWOL meantime. She had reconnected over social media with an old lover from the Canary Islands. A British traveler who had retained a faded photograph taken at night on a beach in Maspalomas. In the photograph, he was noticeably older, with white already intruding into a red-colored beard and a flat cap. She was who she was at that time, looking somewhat naively out at the camera (and who took that photo? Probably some other tourist who had been passing by). That had all happened back in 1999. They had found each other. “Can’t you see,” she said, showing me the photo. “He was the real love of my life!” He was older now. Back then he was late forties. Now he was 70+. Age, they said, was just a number.

God, I hated my life, having to contend with undying 1990s soap operas and getting mugged at Veeriku Selver. It was almost as bad a lifetime sentence to suburbia. But, as Rage Against the Machine once sang, anger is a gift. I made short work of the Veeriku thieves. The other two retreated into the alleyways, and I picked “Andreas” up and brought him inside. He called me a coward and unmanly for not settling things the old-fashioned way and for leaving him with the guards. I told him that I wasn’t a policeman, it wasn’t my job to deal with criminals. Later, he tried to tell the Tartu Police that it had all been a gag, that he had just been pretend-stealing.

Inside of Veeriku Selver, I encountered Erland and his Musi examining some carrots and potatoes. They were gathering ingredients for soup, but seemed lost in their cooperative world of steady relationship. Upstairs, I discovered a room for guests and sat on a couch. I turned on the old-fashioned TV set. The TV was showing M*A*S*H. Alan Alda was making another one of those jokes I could never understand. And there was that other character, Radar. I can’t say I ever enjoyed M*A*S*H but it was the only thing on Estonian television.

Uncle Frank then appeared at the door with a box of pizza. Uncle Frank was a family friend, so he was not a biological uncle, but he fulfilled many uncle-like duties in his time. He had gray hair, blue eyes, wore a blue polo shirt open at the collar. He reminded me, vaguely, of the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island, though a more sober, slimmed down version. Uncle Frank was also my godfather and he was also dead. Uncle Frank sat across from me on the couch. He opened the pizza box and began to eat a slice and I did the same. We both sat there watching M*A*S*H and eating pizza. Uncle Frank sighed. He said, “Well, kid. You’ve had a hell of a life.”

IN VÕRU, in the south-eastern corner of Estonia, there is a paneelmaja, or apartment building. This apartment building is made of the same elements of all the other apartment buildings of the 1960s. It is, in that sense, a standard Brezhnevka. However, there are some characteristics that separate it from others. For example, it’s built in a precise square with a courtyard at centre, including an old swimming pool. Nobody has been in that pool since Gorbachev was premier and it’s now used for storing potatoes. It’s covered in graffiti referencing Billie Eilish.

This common courtyard though is a place of interaction for the tenants of the Võru apartment building. They can watch each other, spy on each other’s comings and goings. I went there to stay in the building to spend some time with my child. What I found there was true delirium.

What kinds of people live in the Võru apartment building? Woodsy lumberjack-looking tenants with a predilection for the New Age. That means men in red flannel shirts and beards with tiny Ganesha statuettes bedside. They are all meditating and fasting when they are not sharpening their sharp axes. The women of the house make good use of them, and partners are switched and swapped out like lightbulbs. The men give when they are asked to and ask no questions. Such is the way of the Võrumaa matriarchy. When they are no longer needed for sexual favors or car repairs, they head into the Võru forests to tap birch juice or chop more wood for winter.

Children roam the halls of the Võru apartment building freely. I have seen small blonde children leaping between the floors. I myself was heading up a set of concrete stairs when I encountered a small boy in striped pajamas teetering dangerously on the edge of a balcony, the guard rail of which had collapsed. This small boy I took in my arms and went racing around the building looking for his mother. She turned out to be in bed managing her online business while listening to a few self-help podcasts from a guru. A light-haired blonde woman in a homemade blanket. She was still in her pajamas. She was stretching, blinking strangely at me.

“Your son almost fell off the balcony,” I told her. “Maybe you should take better care of him.”

“Don’t worry about Joosep,” said the lady. “He likes to play on the balcony but he never falls.”

AFTER RUSSIA surrendered to Estonia, celebrations were held in both capitals. Estonians were able to roam the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow at will, taking photos of themselves lounging in its furniture. Koit Toome reclined by the fireplace, taking turns stoking the fire with Tanel Padar. Mart Sander was playing billiards in the other room with Anu Saagim. Someone had torn Lavrov’s portrait off the wall. One could only see half of Lavrov’s face.

My friend Stig decided to hold an ancillary meeting for the Estonian and Russian communities in the Canary Islands, which happened to coincide with his 18th annual 30th birthday party. It was held at the MTV Beach House, which meant Stig and Riken, the worldwise wandering Japanese mountaineer, spent much of the time networking and pressing the flesh with various dignitaries around the pool, which was filled with tanned young beautiful people in Baywatch red bikinis and swimming trunks playing volleyball. Stig was dressed in his summer finest, which included a Hawaiian shirt and matching shorts. Riken wore loose desert camouflage garb, including pants and jacket, and I wondered if he always was dressed to hike, or if those were the only clothes he owned. They walked around the pool celebrating New Victory Day.

“The Sign” by Ace of Base was playing.

Somewhat tired of the scene, I retired to my room at the Canary Islands MTV Beach House, where I began to work on the next chapter of what would surely prove to be a poorly received and misunderstood work. But Stig and Riken were soon at the window, chastising me for living more in the digital world and less in the real world, “where people stop being polite and start getting real,” as Stig put it as he admonished me. After that I returned to the party, only to meet a boisterous woman who looked Spanish but was speaking Estonian. She was clothed in a flowing blue dress and she had lots of silver rings on her fingers. She was sipping some kind of fruity cocktail and regaling her girlfriends with stories of outlandish behavior. These are the kinds of women I like, I thought. The ones who are truly horrible. The ones with filthy souls.

“We should go on a date,” I told the woman in the blue dress. “A date?” she answered me while licking a line of sea salt off her wrist before swallowing another shot. “You mean a date date?”

“Yes,” I said. “You can wear nice clothes and I can wear nice clothes. We can meet together somewhere and eat food. I will even offer to pay, but will accept if you refuse. Then we can talk about our lives, our jobs, who broke our hearts.” The woman in the blue dress wiped some of the tequila from her lips and said, “It doesn’t sound so bad, the way you put it. And I thought you had promised the world that you would never go on another date.” “Well, Russia just surrendered,” I told her. “Koit Toome is in the Kremlin. Surely that’s cause for celebration.”

ON THE ROAD, like Jack Kerouac, except this time in Ida-Virumaa, along the north coast. This time I was hitchhiking and was picked up by some lady who claimed to be Kerouac’s aunt. She brought me back to her homestead and gave me tea. She said that hitchhikers were thronging the roads of Ida-Viru due to the recent posthumous publication of Kerouac’s secret diaries of a 1964 trek through Soviet Estonia. She proved her point by gesturing outside where a classmate I hadn’t seen since junior high was drinking tea in the yard with the chickens. Dan had last been seen in about 1994 or so wearing a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt. “But I haven’t seen him since chemistry class,” I told Kerouac’s aunt. “He barely came to school.” Dan had gone gray in the intervening 30 years. He wore a black leather jacket, drank tea, and scribbled poetry. “Dan’s been here for months,” the lady said. “He also loves Ida-Virumaa. It’s become a hipster magnet.”

Later, I took a bus along the north coast in the direction of Tallinn. My bus left me off down by the port near the ferries to Helsinki. MacDougal, another former classmate from the Nineties, was on the bus. Having become a hotshot attorney since, he was less friendly than he perhaps should have been. He was in a hurry to catch the last boat to Finland. When we got off the bus though, we noticed that someone had left behind a knapsack full of contraband alcohol. MacDougal, freckly Scotsman that he was, advised we leave it at the ferry ticket office, but not before insisting that the alcohol be refrigerated in its office. “We can’t allow the poor fellow’s drink to attain room temperature,” he said. “When he retrieves it, it should be chilled.” MacDougal found room for the bottles in the office fridge and then went to the boat. “Nice seeing you, man,” MacDougal said before rushing off. “Let’s meet again in another 30 years!”

A snowstorm blew through the city after that. It obscured everyone’s vision, including my own, a total whiteout. When the storm withdrew, I realized that I was no longer in Tallinn, but at the docks in Nantucket. I watched as a solitary jeep drove over the ice and cobblestones down to the ferry terminal. Wiping the ice and snow from my eyes, I started up Main Street. All of the cafes, boutiques, and book shops were closed. At Orange Street, I turned left and walked ahead until I looked up and saw the haunted Unitarian Universalist Church, with its golden glinting sun-like dome. It looked like a distant junior cousin of the Helsinki Cathedral. I stood there and admired the church through the snow and mist. It was for me another lost friend.