The Observer Effect. November 2

I gave the book to Alexey. He is by the window now, reading. It’s strange.

He is an engineer, a man of schematics and systems, a practitioner to his very marrow. What could he possibly find in this ornate, metaphorical text, in this glass bead game invented by another engineer who desperately wanted to be a poet? Perhaps because within it, everything is governed by its own hidden laws, like a complex circuit where every element is in its proper place, even if it appears chaotic from the outside. Or perhaps because tech people are the biggest dreamers of all — only they dream of order.

And what happened to me? Where did that seventeen-year-old girl go, who read these very same lines locked in her room and couldn’t hold back her tears? She believed every word. She wept over Mei’s fate, over Wang’s loneliness, over the very idea that the world could be cruel and unjust. The girl who believed that words could alter reality, that books were keys to other worlds, rather than just a way to escape one’s own. When did I forget how to cry over books? When did I stop believing that the best was yet to come? Where did she get lost? Did she shatter against a divorce, dry up amidst endless sociological reports, suffocate in the Moscow smog?

Perhaps this is what growing up is — when even the most powerful emotions become memories, and memories become mere words on paper. Or perhaps it is simply exhaustion, accumulated over years of every day looking exactly like the last, to the point where even a miracle feels like an inconvenience, something completely out of place.

The village is already asleep. It is dark outside the window. Neither the elder nor the dog has returned.

Silence. Sleep won’t come. Everything feels alien, even my own thoughts.

November 3 →
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River