There's a positive, uplifting effect to reliving memories it's especially useful to me now, that I fell on black days. And that's why I continue here with the spring that preceded that July.

Marilyn Monroe in St. Martin

I told her we're leaving some time around 1 am; she followed. Her home was in High Park and it took us a while to get there. The Hogtown was asleep and we were alone in Canada's Wonderland, with my car speeding on the hilly road being the only attraction left open. "Your drivin' myakes mey syick" she said, with a thick Russian accent, half resigned and half spoiled like a little princess. "You neeyd to go more slowly" she said, wiser than the great tortoise in the middle of the Earth. "Technically, I don't need to," I said; "you need me to, but that's the way I like to drive, and besides, it's late and there's nobody on the road." We exchanged a few more replies and I started laughing. "Why are you laughing? You're not funny." What she was really saying is that she was disappointed - I wasn't turning her on, nor was I at least trying to. On the contrary, I was massaging her anxiety bone and she didn't like that. But somewhere in the midst of this weird conversation, something weirder happened: I started to like her, arrogance and selfishness and anxiety and all.


My car windows are foggy, she is happily blushing and her pupils are so dilated I can see the bottom of her heart (it's rather close to her neck; so are her feet). She's radiating heat, except for her hands, which are always a bit colder. She gives me a smile and writes on the window, in the Cyrillic alphabet, “Piersic” (персик). She asks me "you know?" and I'm thinking it's about a Romanian actor who is nothing like me. He's old and has got a son who's also very much unlike me. I try to explain that to her, and she proceeds to describe a fruit (Peach). "Am I a fruit? Do you know what that means?" I ask her. "Peach's very good. You bite it, and it melts in your mouth, and you swallow, and it's very sweet, and the flavour stays in you for days. The sweetness is extraordinary." She pauses for effect and gives me another wonderful smile. I tell her I'm OK with all that, except for the biting part.



I don't know why or how I fell in love with her. She wasn't the most beautiful woman I've ever met, she wasn't the smartest, she wasn't the blondest, but there was something about her presence that always messed me up. My heart would start racing for no reason (she enjoyed feeling it with her always-cold-as-fuck hands. I spent hours days trying to understand why, especially since this was totally counterproductive for our relationship - it transformed me into a mushy, devoid of personality moron. I had to end it, as much as it hurt me, because I just could not shake my stupidity. We've met quite recently, and I finally gave her a piece of my mind. Yet my heart betrayed me again.