I think he was yelling, "Have a nice trip!" Or maybe not. Maybe he yelled "unhappy". Or maybe something completely different. The fact is that he yelled very quietly.
Whispering.
Silently.
To myself.
Externally, everything looked as if the scream ripped him apart, clobbered inside: his shoulders bounced, his lips curved. He could open his mouth and publish a howl, wheezing, a set of sounds of wild tonality, and could transform it all into a couple of words of bouncing tone. And then it would have been something like goodbye. But the farewell didn't work out.
My condition was no better. Something was also wobbling in me, vibrating in the area of cheekbones. I was afraid to talk and - to cry, I didn't want to make things worse. We pulled ourselves away from each other by force, but without a single sound...
I was walking among the grey high-rises. They leaned toward each other, and when I blinked, they swung back. And again, they were crumbling. I'd roll up my eyes and cry for tears. And then, out of nowhere, there was a storm of poplar down. The fluff climbed into his eyes, behind the collar, crunching under his feet. The down lined the path to the parking lot, and from above it looked like the Milky Way. It was like the Milky Way, under which we were lying hot last summer on the cooled ground and let cigarette smoke into the sky. Like the Milky Way we were going to walk sometime...
Letov sang in the car:
Like a whole world, like a snowball,
It's like a straightforward, guessworking thing,
As if forever, as if irretrievably,
And again at first...
The "dead" have been repeated many times in a row and have become our parting anthem. Leaving you was like quitting smoking. When you count the hours, days, and nights - and then you think - I haven't smoked in four days, and that's just one cigarette. I haven't texted you in four days, and that's just one message... The only difference is that I couldn't think about cigarettes all the time, and I couldn't think about you.
No more meetings at our column at Kropotkinskaya. There will be no more books with signatures - on the first turn, unbridled, jumping handwriting, as if you were writing in a crazy train, although you always signed the books quietly, at the table. There will be no more weekends at the cottage, which were as striking as a Bunin sunstroke, despite the cool nights ... We had nothing without each other. We were dead.
I realized that there was loneliness that could be touched. You can touch the phone and understand that you only want to write to one person. The one you broke up with.
That's just one message...
I wrote it. We agreed to meet at Kropotkinskaya. I was worried, like before the first date. I arrived too early. But you were already waiting for me at the convoy. Your eyes, black to such an extent that you never understood what they were saying, were illuminated from the inside. Thus a sunstroke. Something hit me on the back of the head, too. And I finally smiled. We hugged and resurrected. We ascended from the subway.
First, I wanted to talk about the days without you. But what, what was there to say? What was I thinking last night, why live now? Did she die of self-pity the night before last? And the night before last, she was playing our best moments to the song "The Dead" on the rehearsal, trying unsuccessfully to break you out of her heart?
Now I understand why Letov sang "as if forever, as if irretrievably". We decided: we would see each other seldom, but we would see each other. What's better - two hours of happiness a week or a lifetime without happiness? Of course, to see each other in secret (without words, it was clear that it was a secret from your wife, whom we never discussed and never called by name). She was the reason we broke up, and suddenly she was completely forgotten again. And like in our first weeks, I was sitting in a chair drinking wine as if it didn't exist in nature.
We were on the terrace of a cafe. We held hands under the table. The accordion was playing quietly, and the notes were trembling in the air like poplar down in the gusts of wind. The evening sun was throwing up in the wine glasses. We smoked again.
On the other side of the street was a three-storey house with long windows, antennas, and brown entrance doors. And I thought it would be great to move into our favorite neighborhood...
But that was a forbidden thought. We agreed to live in just one moment. It meant living without a future and waiting for nothing else. I had enough for a couple of months. Autumn began, and we met in artificial light that couldn't hit the sun. Then there was another breakup, then another one. "And again I started..."
We're not gonna be silent on breakups anymore. I will yell that you ruined my life. That I cannot dream. You will feel guilty, try to calm me down, say that my life is still ahead. And when everything inside will burn out from the roller coaster of feelings - meetings and partings, meetings and partings, meetings and partings, meetings and partings - we will say goodbye for the last time. Calm down. Only then will we stop feeling and really die. Because only the dead can go out on the balcony and shout "Happy Way! Be careful on the road!" When the love of his life leaves him. And to smoke, as if nothing had happened.