In the autumn of 2012, Nikolay P. called me again. By that time, I had already finished teaching a few programming groups, but Nikolay told me that he had a new group starting and offered me to continue my teaching work. At that point, I already felt confident in my role as a teacher and gladly accepted his offer. I knew it was an excellent opportunity not only to consolidate my skills but also to expand my social circle.
In this new group, I met two guys—Egor and Roma. At first, they were my students, but over time, we became real friends. Both of them were very passionate about programming, and their interest in learning only fueled my own desire to share knowledge. Our classes not only gave them new skills but also created an atmosphere where we could chat, discuss technology, and share experiences.
This new phase in my teaching career brought me not only professional success, but also valuable friends.
One day I was coming home from work—it was a Friday. On the street, I unexpectedly ran into Vasya. At that moment, he didn’t seem particularly dangerous to me, despite everything that had happened before. We lived in neighboring buildings, and, for better or worse, I couldn’t entirely deny that in some way, he was still my friend, even though he had robbed me and was essentially the reason for my breakup with Nadya.
We started talking, and I suggested we take a ride on my scooter. I thought maybe it was time to make peace. We rode around the neighborhood for a bit, and at some point Vasya decided to take the wheel himself. He started speeding through the courtyards, and although the road was wet and slippery, he didn’t seem to care. Suddenly, as he accelerated, he lost control at a turn and we crashed into the bumper of a parked car.
I was thrown a few meters, and Vasya fell too and ended up covered in blood. I immediately ran to him and tried to bring him to his senses, but he didn’t respond right away. Fortunately, after a while, he came to, but he was badly injured, limping and barely able to walk. We decided to tie the scooter to a tree, since I could watch it from my apartment window. I helped Vasya get to his apartment and sent him home.
As I found out later, Vasya went to the doctor and it turned out that he had torn his meniscus. This injury allowed him to avoid military service, which he had been hiding from for a long time.
I, on the other hand, was worried that we had crashed into a car. On the first day, I didn’t dare to go back for the scooter, but a day later I decided to retrieve it. When I approached the scooter, which was still tied to the tree, a police officer came up behind me. His office was right across the street. He asked if the scooter was mine, to which I answered yes. He said, relieved, that they had been watching it for two days to make sure nobody stole it, and told me to take it home.
I unfastened the scooter from the tree, checked its condition and the damage, and took it to a nearby parking lot where I usually kept it.
In early January, I came out of Maryino metro station. I no longer remember what brought me there. It was a cold evening, with a light frost in the air, and the snow-covered streets were lit by the soft glow of streetlamps and windows in the buildings. A few passersby walked along the sidewalks, wrapped in warm scarves. Then, in the light of one of the streetlamps, I saw her—Nadya. She was walking along Maryinsky Boulevard, slightly hunched against the cold. Her hair was hidden under a hat, but even so, she looked familiar. My heart began to beat faster.
I froze for a moment in surprise. Then I ran up to her and, drawing level with her, said, “Hi!” She turned her head, looked at me with slight surprise, and replied, “Oh, hi!”
I was excited to see her. She kept walking, and I tried to keep up. I knew I had little time to talk to her and was choosing what, of all the things I could say, would matter most. So the first thing I said was, “And now I have students of my own.” That really surprised her.
We walked on. I continued, “Damn, I’ve been through some serious shit.” Nadya agreed: “Yeah, you really have been through hell.” When we turned onto the road leading to her home, we stopped for a while, facing each other. I even sat down on a small fence standing a little way off. Then she asked, “So where is your family, where is your personal life?” After everything I had been through, I just didn’t know how to answer. I had no firm footing; I had been betrayed, and I still had to pay off the loan on a car I had already sold. All my energy went into keeping everyday life going. Ahead lay only fog and uncertainty. With so much responsibility and so many obligations, my life didn’t feel stable, and I didn’t feel I could allow myself a personal life. All these thoughts raced through my mind. More than anything, I wanted to say that my personal life was standing right in front of me. But with that burden, I didn’t feel confident enough to speak as though I could count on us being together. So all I said was, “I still have time.”
After my answer, Nadya turned and walked on toward her home. I jumped up from the small fence and drew level with her again. As we walked along the narrow path between the houses, the school, and the trees, I began talking about how I was not a drug addict, did not use drugs, and was nothing like the person she might have thought I was. Nadya replied, “There’s no such thing as a former drug addict.” Her words hurt me deeply. What struck me was not so much the accusation itself as the certainty with which she said it. She spoke as if she were stating something obvious, beyond any doubt.
For me, however, her statement had two problems at once. First, I had never been a drug addict, but she was already placing me in that category. Second, she assumed that someone who had once entered that category could never leave it. In this way, I was being assigned not only a past I had never had, but also a future that had been declared unchangeable in advance.
At the time, though, I did not yet use the concept of a “category” into which a person could be placed. But I already felt that something fundamentally wrong was happening. I stood before someone, trying to tell her about myself, and it was as if she couldn’t see me. I was facing more than distrust: a system of beliefs formed in advance, in which a particular place had already been assigned to me.
And the worst part was that I didn’t even know how to resist it. How can you prove to someone that you are not who they think you are when their belief itself rules out any such proof? The situation required more than telling her about myself: I had to contend with her idea of what kinds of people exist at all and what they can be like. But the situation itself gave me no way to do that. It left me feeling powerless.
As we continued walking through the snow-covered streets toward her home, I complained a little about the guys who had surrounded me in the past: “They’re all thieves and liars there.” Nadya replied, “You were the same.” I objected to that too. Inside, I exploded again. I had never been like that. But once again, she spoke about me as if she already knew who I was, leaving me only to justify myself against her idea of me.
Then I mentioned Vasya, saying, “That fucker will never be able to run again.” I thought so myself at the time. I meant the incident in which Vasya fell off my scooter and tore his meniscus, though I didn’t mention that detail. I left room for her to interpret my words herself. She could have thought I had struck back at Vasya, or she could have decided I was just an unhinged guy with no sense of boundaries. And although I was technically being honest, I already sensed, almost subconsciously, that this was another moment when a mistaken assumption could turn into a fact. That was exactly what infuriated me: she had the chance to ask what had happened, and then, of course, I would have told her how it was. But she didn’t.
We reached the entrance to her building, and she took out her keys and opened the door. We went into the building together and climbed the steps to the elevator. She stepped into the elevator, and I stayed outside: I felt that this was a boundary I should not cross if I did not want to seem pushy. As the elevator door began to close, I said one last time that I was not a drug addict. She did not answer, and I headed for the exit.
As I walked around for a little while, replaying our conversation, I was still glad I had met Nadya and that we had managed to have at least some kind of conversation. Soon afterward, I went home.
After the meeting, I remembered how, six months earlier at a personal growth training, we had been told that our wishes needed a date. Back then, I had wished to cross paths with Nadya around this time. I felt something mystical: as if what I had wished for back then had come true almost at the appointed time.
Some time later, buoyed by the meeting, I decided to do something nice for Nadya. I bought a huge plush bear at one of the shopping malls. One day I simply went to her building, got inside, went up to her floor, and left the bear by the shared door leading to the apartments. I was glad to give her that gift. I wanted to win her goodwill and, through gestures like this, soften her categorical judgments about me. I remember that some time later a status appeared on her VKontakte page: “Drug addict or what?” Maybe it was a reaction to my gift.
To add some variety to my life, I decided to fly to Germany and walk around Berlin. I began preparing for the trip: I got a visa, bought tickets. I was in Berlin from March 13 to 20. It was my first trip to Europe alone, but to be honest, it turned out to be rather dull and monotonous. There, I visited a few familiar places where I had been with Masha, and also went to the Berlin Zoo. Mostly, I wandered through shopping centers and sometimes sat in bars drinking beer. I didn’t manage to make any new acquaintances. In the end, the trip to Germany didn’t give me the renewal or healing I had hoped for.
Time was relentlessly approaching my diploma defense, which was scheduled for mid-June 2013. After returning from Germany, I naturally began to prepare intensively for this important stage. The topic I chose was the process of creating guidebooks at our publishing house. I wanted to describe in detail how we brought an idea to life: from the initial concept to the final release of the finished guidebook. It was an opportunity not only to demonstrate my knowledge and skills but also to analyze the whole process in which I had been actively involved.
However, along with this, a new wave of depression began for me. I kept being tormented by thoughts of Nadya, as I had no way of changing her attitude towards me. I knew I was capable of being caring and kind, but I felt cornered—my potential was there, but I had neither the resources nor the opportunities to realize it.
This situation only worsened: I started drinking heavily after work, gradually losing control over my life. Strange coincidences began to follow me: I lost my passport and other important things several times, and often went to the passport office, where they already recognized me and jokingly suggested I could lose my passport every month.
In the end, I made the decision to quit the “Vokrug Sveta” magazine. May 31 was my last day at work. It was not an easy decision, but I understood that it was necessary. In the editorial office, they even hinted several times that this was entirely my initiative, and no one tried to convince me to stay. Despite that, I felt my time at the magazine had come to an end, and I needed to move on.
By the end of June, I successfully defended my diploma. Everything went smoothly, and I received my well-earned certificate, which became an important conclusion to this stage of my life. Nevertheless, despite the successful defense, I felt empty inside. University was behind me, and with its completion, all my usual reference points disappeared.
Now I had to think about what to do next. Constant uncertainty and anxiety followed me. The thought that Nadya, as I believed, saw me as a fraud only intensified this feeling. Losing passports and other little troubles seemed to me like ominous signs, as if life itself was trying to corner me.
And so, I reached the end of June 2013 without any clear prospects. The future seemed foggy, and I was sinking into a deep crisis. Constant breakdowns and a sense of hopelessness became my companions. It was during this period that I had a dream that changed everything.
