September 12, 2022
We were celebrating my birthday.
Deborah somehow found a cake. Yellow. Or orange? It was nice.
The café was a little dark for some reason. I picked up a guitar to sing “I Like That You Are Not in Love With Me.”
But my fingers wouldn’t obey. I plucked, pressed the strings, but no sound came out.
Then Michael took the guitar from my hands — and it started to sing! Figuratively speaking.
The guitar started playing. And I started singing. Michael quietly sang along.
“I like that you are not in love with me…”
I was singing and feeling that I didn’t actually like that Michael was not in love with me.
But, God, how he played!
At the line “That the heavy globe of Earth…” I could hear his soul soaring with the music.
At “Thank you with both heart and hand,” he was no longer murmuring, but singing out loud with me, in a duet.
Suddenly, violins started playing from somewhere…
And by the time we reached “For the rarity of meeting at sunset hours,” his guitar was already being drowned out by a symphony orchestra, and we were singing in full voice.
At “For the sun that is not ours overhead,” I threw my head back and leaned it against the back of the couch.
The orchestra went silent just as we started whispering, “For the fact that you, alas, are not in love with me…”
After the final chord, there were a few seconds of silence, during which we, holding our breath, listened to the last vibration of the string fade away.
Then we, and all the guests, started clapping.
Michael jumped up from the couch, placed the guitar down, scribbled something on a piece of paper on the coffee table — and ran out of the café.
On the paper, it said: “We are still just friends, you know that.”
It was true for him. But not for me.
September 12, 2022
The storm covered the sky with mist.
I was at my grandmother’s house, and Aunt Galya was also there. Suddenly, a hurricane started. I saw through the window how a two-story cottage nearby was crushed and scattered like a house of cards. I ran outside. I wanted to run — but where? To check on my car? To check on my house? I lost my sense of purpose and just walked against the wind along the cobblestone pier by the water toward the shore. It even seemed strange to me that I could keep walking. I wondered: if I jumped, would the wind carry me away?
And I jumped.
The wind easily lifted me and carried me. Not forward, but upward, destroying the meaning of gravity itself. It became dark. All I could see was the white earth moving farther away beneath my feet and the white building of the theater. Soon everything turned blue-white as the darkness grew thicker. I was carried higher and higher, and only the spiral streams of huge snowflakes remained visible in the cold wind currents, which, like strong hands, held and tossed me along icy spirals.
I realized I had to do something. Somehow return. I gathered my strength and dived downward along one of the spirals — and suddenly, I regained my weight. The earth started pulling me back. Now I was just afraid of hitting the ground too hard. I tucked into a ball and tried to fall along the surface, with the wind. To my surprise, I didn’t crash. Only wet snow blinded my eyes.
I ended up right in front of the theater.
The building looked like one of the St. Petersburg palaces, with a richly decorated entrance on the second floor where a carriage could have once arrived.
At the entrance, I showed my ticket and slipped past the cloakroom — for some reason, everyone was holding their coats in their hands. In the restaurant where people were spending time before the play, all the waiters were French and looked like they worked at an elite French restaurant: black pants and vests, white shirts, black bow ties, and long white aprons reaching the floor.
They spoke French and served unusual dishes.
I picked a platter of meat and vegetable appetizers. Suddenly, it was announced that we could go into the auditorium. Food wasn’t allowed inside, so I started stuffing my mouth with appetizers, rushing not to miss the beginning of the play, which made it hard to chew because my mouth was full.
Then the cat screamed and woke me up.
I never got to eat those French appetizers.