#hasbulla

When my mom used to ask me as a kid, “Who do you wanna be when you grow up?”, I just blinked at her innocently. It was December 1918 outside, and although I was only two years old — still trying to grasp how rebellious Gavrilo Princip truly was — that iconic question of hers somehow kept echoing in my little head. The next morning, when I was already forty-three, I walked up to my mom, tugged at the hood of her oversized Trippie Redd hoodie, and in a thin, childish voice exclaimed: “Mom, I wanna become nothing but a miserable shadow — one that inspires the great Hasbulla aka Hasbik to write books. I’ll slip into his mind like a tiny phantom, whisper to him to take the nickname C.J. Night, and then we’ll go on a world tour — Dagestan, Alaska, Lemuria — reading excerpts from his novels to the global audience.” And my mom looked at me and said: “Who the hell are you, asshole?”

C.J. Night, ghostwriter of his own hallucinations.