In the first days after moving to the Tushino district, I began to feel as if the police might be watching me. I would simply walk through the streets, listening to music in my headphones, and from time to time I would notice police officers nearby or a police car that seemed to be moving in my direction.
I did not know how to interpret this, and I did not understand what was happening. I had no clear evidence that my movements were actually being tracked, but I periodically felt this directed attention. At the same time, the thought of being watched did not particularly disturb me; in a strange way, it even gave me a sense of protection. If I was under observation, then I was safe. My guesses and inner intuition suggested to me that this might have been connected to Nadia.
Still, Nadia did not leave my thoughts even without that and occupied almost all of my inner space. The situation was already difficult, and now I had also broken the silence by recently sending her messages that probably only deepened the rupture between us.
I was aware that, from the outside, what was happening could look different from how it felt from within. For me, those messages were a spontaneous gesture made from a state of threat and confusion. I was trying to communicate what was happening to me and to ask, somehow, for help in a situation that I perceived as a real disaster.
But within the ordinary logic of a breakup, they could have looked like an intrusive attempt to appear in her life again and restore contact in a strange and inappropriate way. I understood this, and it made me feel even worse.
This understanding only intensified my anxiety. After all the October and New Year messages, after my suggestion that she listen to the song “Kravts — Against the Wind,” she could already have considered me a drug addict, a criminal, or simply an unstable person. Now, after I had written to her again, I imagined that in her perception I had begun to look even worse.
What for me was a call for help in an exceptional situation could have looked to her like yet another sign of inadequacy. Because of this, a desire grew stronger and stronger in me to one day justify myself before her, to explain that everything was not the way she thought it was. But at the same time, I understood that more and more events were gradually accumulating, each of which would also have to be explained later.
There was a strange and tormenting effect in this: if the initial point is understood incorrectly, then all subsequent actions begin to be perceived through that distortion. Every new event seems to fall onto the wrong trajectory, and the chain that later needs to be untangled becomes longer and more complicated. Everything that was happening to me seemed like an absurdity in which I should never have ended up.
Nikolai P. gave me active support in this situation: we spoke on the phone, and at some point he suggested that I try teaching at his educational center “Leader.” Previously, this center had been a franchise of the earlier company where I had worked, but after that company collapsed, it became an independent educational institution.
For me, Nikolai P.’s offer was unexpected, although the experience of teaching others had been familiar to me since my school years, when I earned extra money by setting up computers in the neighborhood. Even at my previous job, I often taught colleagues various skills and subtleties of programming. But the idea of conducting full courses for students was a new and interesting challenge for me.
In addition to this, Nikolai P. asked me to continue supporting the internal web system for tracking clients and training courses, which I had previously worked on as an employee of the parent company. I agreed both to teach and to continue supporting this system.
On the one hand, this additional work really helped me distract myself from life’s problems and relieve part of my internal tension. On the other hand, looking back at it today, I understand that Nikolai P.’s offer was not only an attempt to support me and occupy me with work, but also a quite practical calculation: the educational center needed a teacher and someone who already knew the internal web system, while my circumstances made it possible to solve both tasks more cheaply than through a full external hire.
The groups were small; sometimes the lessons were held individually, and in this there appeared a sense of meaning that I badly lacked at the time. For the first time, I felt that teaching others could be not just a one-time activity, but a real profession that I wanted to master more deeply.
Despite this, the financial burden continued to grow. Several obligations pressed down on me at once. First, the car loan: the monthly payments were unavoidable, although the purchase itself was already beginning to feel like a decision into which I had somehow been drawn. Second, I was now renting an apartment, something I had never done before. All of this created constant additional tension, and reality seemed to be tightening around me more and more densely.
It was precisely in these circumstances that Sonya contacted me — the same friend who had once supported me after my breakup with Nadia and convinced me not to refuse the job offer at the publishing house Around the World. She had started dating a guy and was planning to live together with him, so they asked whether I could rent them my vacant apartment. I thought this would be a good option for additional income and agreed. Besides that, they asked me for the keys to the car, which I could not use myself because I did not have a driver’s license. I agreed to that too, thinking that at least it would not be sitting idle.
At the time, I was largely acting inertially. I was lost, poorly understood how to protect my boundaries, and often agreed to things that only increased the pressure on me. I gave them the apartment with the expectation of receiving money, but during the three months that Sonya and her boyfriend lived there, I never received a single kopeck from them. The car remained mine, I paid the loan, and they used it. Looking back, I see that in many such situations the same motif repeated itself: other people solved their problems, saved resources, or removed part of their burden at my expense.
One day, while sitting with my laptop in the rented apartment, I noticed one of Nadia’s friends on VKontakte. This seemed a little strange to me: after our breakup, people connected to her had been removing me from their friends en masse, while this contact, for some reason, had remained.
It was Nastya A. — I will refer to her this way because I no longer remember her surname. I decided to write to her. Not because I clearly understood what I wanted to achieve by doing so, but rather because she suddenly seemed to me like a kind of preserved channel of communication with Nadia. It seemed to me that through her it might still be possible to convey my position to Nadia, my truth, to explain that everything that had happened was not what it could look like from the outside, and at least somehow to fix a more correct version of events, one closer to the truth.
I began my conversation with Nastya A. with a question: what is more important — the result or the process? She answered that the process was more important, and for some time the conversation continued. Then she wrote: “Dude, we’ve only seen each other once.” After these words, it became especially clear that my very appearance in her space was already being perceived as a continuation of the same inadequacy from which I was trying to distance myself. There was distance in her words, and for me there was also confirmation that I was not being understood and that no one wanted to look into the situation that I perceived as force majeure.
At some point, I could not take it anymore and tried to say directly that something bad was happening to me, that something heavy and abnormal was unfolding around me. But no one wanted to look into it. My words were apparently perceived not as an attempt to explain my condition, but as yet another manifestation of inadequacy. After that, Nastya A. wrote: “Dude, we’re from different social circles” — and blocked me.
This gesture hit me hard. In my real life, I had a job as a programmer at a publishing house, important projects, responsibility, and skills that I had been developing for years. But in response to my attempt to explain what was happening to me, I received not understanding, but a sharp indication of social distance — as if someone had simply shown me my place and closed the door.
It was humiliating and painful. Once again, I was not heard. Instead of a living person with his own history and circumstances, they saw an image that had almost nothing to do with what I myself knew about myself and my life.
Here again appeared a mechanism that was tormenting for me: it is very difficult for truth to break through if the door is closed before it in advance. A person passes incoming information through an internal filter, sees separate signs, imposes an already prepared framework on them — and after that the meaning seems to be determined in advance. Everything that does not fit this prepared meaning simply does not get inside.
I felt more and more clearly that this was not an accidental mistake of one conversation, but part of reality itself, in which truth is often not even given a chance to be heard. Everything seemed turned upside down, and this feeling deprived me of support even more strongly.
In general, uncertainty weighed heavily on me. I had already left my district, encountered a large number of unpleasant events, and understood less and less where I even was in my own life. I did not know whether there would be further blows, whether something new would happen that would make everything even worse.
The future had stopped being a space in which one could make plans. There was no sense of safety in it, no route, no understanding of how to live further, what to do, what to strive for, or what to hope for. This absence of support constantly pressed on me and overloaded my head.
Against this background, I developed a bad habit: after work, I began stopping by to buy beer. It briefly dulled the anxiety and seemed to calm the inner judge, who was almost constantly analyzing, evaluating, and accusing something.
In my relationship with Nadia, I liked not only what happened between us, but also the fact that she had her own interesting company: people with whom one could play games, walk around, go somewhere, and simply spend time together. A similar feeling also appeared in my relationship with Masha — she too had her own friendly circle.
I was drawn to the very feeling of such a group: a stable, living, slightly courtyard-like environment where people did not simply know each other separately, but existed together. I did have companies at times, but more often these were separate acquaintances or a temporary presence in someone else’s circle. I do not think I ever formed my own stable company in which I felt like a natural part of a shared space.
The loss of Nadia was for me not only the loss of my relationship with her, but also the loss of her surroundings. Together with her, Dasha, Maxim, and other people whom I had met through her and to whom I had become attached in my own way also left my life. It was painful for me to think that they had formed a wrong opinion of me. I wanted to be part of their lives, sincerely reached toward friendship with them, but circumstances unfolded differently.
After that, the desire grew stronger in me for one day to have my own company — not one I entered through a girlfriend, not someone else’s circle temporarily opened to me through a relationship, but my own people, my own space, where I would not be a guest or an attachment to someone else’s life, but a natural part of a shared movement.
I began to live in the tension between this desire and what actually existed. On the outside, I still had work, a rented apartment, debts, uncertainty, and loneliness. Inside, however, an almost stubborn faith gradually appeared that such a company would still come into my life. I suppose I needed to believe in it, because not believing was even heavier and more pointless. This faith did not solve my problems, but it gave me a direction: as if somewhere ahead there already existed the thing I was reaching for, even though in reality it was not there yet.
And one day this inner expectation strangely took on an external form. In a courtyard next to my workplace, between the buildings on Svobody Street, I was sitting on a bench with a bottle of beer. The bench stood slightly aside from the playground. On the playground itself, I noticed a group of kids — teenagers occupied with their own affairs. At some point, they unexpectedly came up to me and decided to get acquainted.
They were Nastya M., Liza, and her boyfriend Andrey L. Nastya M. had dark hair, Liza was blonde. The oldest among them was Andrey L.: he was about eighteen. As far as I remember, he said that he was studying at a vocational school. Nastya M. was sixteen, but her seventeenth birthday was already approaching. Liza, as far as I remember, was about fourteen or fifteen.
We got acquainted, started talking, and I told them about myself: that I worked in the neighboring building and lived near the Skhodnenskaya metro station, where I was renting an apartment. They were surprised when they learned that I was already twenty-three: at first they had thought I was their age. We exchanged phone numbers. With Andrey L., I then walked toward home later that same day: like me, he lived not far from the Skhodnenskaya metro station, and for some time we walked together and talked.
When I returned home, I entered the apartment, where, as usual, my brother and our dog Alfina were. I did not tell my brother in detail about the meeting that had just happened. This too was a continuation of my habit of not sharing with him everything that was happening inside and around me. I did not always understand why he needed this information, how he would perceive it, or what was even supposed to follow from such a story. Besides, around him I often tried to hold myself like a person who had everything more or less under control.
We talked about simple things, about how his day had gone. He told me that he had walked the dog and done things around the house. With that, the day gradually came to an end: each of us went to his own room and lay down to sleep.
Gradually, this company became my own for me, and I began spending free time with them after work or on weekends. Sometimes other guys joined us as well, but most often it was precisely us who gathered. Despite the age difference, our communication was easy and relaxed.
The Around the World publishing house was located in a three-story building with an inner courtyard surrounded by a fence. In the courtyard there was a gazebo where my colleagues and I would go out for smoke breaks.
Sometimes the guys would come up to the building and end up behind the fence exactly at the moments when I came out into the courtyard. We would talk across the fence: they would ask when I would finish work and whether I would go for a walk with them. There was something from school years in this — as if friends were dropping by after lessons so that we could then go off together for a walk. Such meetings brought us even closer.
The appearance of the guys from Tushino became something more for me than just a chance meeting in a courtyard. In my perception, it looked almost like reality answering the inner tension in which I was living. I dreamed of having my own company, held on to the faith that it would appear — and suddenly there really were people nearby with whom I could spend time, walk around, meet after work, and feel like part of a living shared space. For me, this became a small revelation: as if what had long existed only inside me as desire and faith had suddenly materialized in the most ordinary courtyard scene.
