Dreaming of Tashkent

Now that I’m long gone and missing Uzbekistan sorely, I find my memories flooding in, haunting dreams, daydreams, strange associations and coincidences such as finding that my barber here is from Uzbekistan, an article in the newspaper, a phone call from a friend from the past, an email out of the blue from someone I hadn’t heard from in a long time.

Right now, I’m home in the US. I wish I could go back to this place I left some years ago. But I know it’s unlikely that I would be granted a visa, likely not until the government changes. And who knows when that will happen.

I have a lot of memories about the place that I haven’t been able to talk about. I was worried in the past about my safety, the safety of the others involved in my story. But enough time has passed since I left there and chances are I’m not going to be able to get back there any time soon.

Until then, I have my correspondences and my memories that inspire me, bring me back to that time as a gay expatriate in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Especially of those more innocent times which were not so innocent. In fact, they were pretty bad; there were still reportedly 6,000 political prisoners in the country's prisons. But then things really got bad, after the massacre; we never expected that, that they would shoot at their own citizens and devastate a whole town, chase out the foreigners, stopped renewing our visas, withdrew our press accreditations, issued stern threats on mysterious phone calls in the middle of the night with precise instructions to leave the country on the next plane out, leaving no time to say goodbye, and lie to the world about what happened, about what we witnessed before our very own eyes as they shot at us.  ¶ 6:16 PM