My mother suffered sadistic treatment from her mother in her childhood, this made her an introvert, but she became not like those women who live alone till the end being very offish and unsociable and all, nay, she became very smiling, very responsive, although very fragile and sensitive and still retaining injures and pain from childhood. Plus she was the prettiest girl in every company she was in, and due to that she got a few rape attempts on her in the youth, and she was often in quarrel with the colleagues at work and ended up fired – all that due to her prettiness and modesty (if she were a male, it might be said that she was bullied). She also had one or two abortions from a not serious relation with her married tutor in university. Her father was an uncommunicative man, almost like me now. In her 27 she met my clownish father.
My father was grown up by his indulgent mother and with sister, he had no man near him in his childhood, and as a result he became carefree, absolutely not an introvert, he would like to have nothing to do in life except to read books on a sofa being treated with meals by some woman, in other words he became what maybe is called in english - a gigolo. It was also communism which caused his infantility, he is still dreaming about living in Cuba, about that style of life there, where anything is given free, as he thinks.
Mum and dad soon found simplicity and а tendency to have fun and laugh as their mutual features, although except that they had nothing in common. After a month of their relations I was conceived. mum says it was he whose idea was to leave me (not to do an abortion) and she would have definitely not done that if she had understood what my father was like. My father had no idea where to live, he wasn’t even thinking about renting. Though an philologist, he had no serious job and wasn’t going to apply to one, it was against his and his mother’s rules, they really thought it was a woman who ought to earn living. His mother herself showed an example working on several jobs feeding him, an adult man.
So after marrying they moved with me to dad’s flat where he lived with his mother and sister. His mother also poked her nose into any business of our family, my mum was feeling like she had married his mother instead of him. After a year my mum had fed up and moved with me to her own parents. After a severe dispute her sadistic mother backed down and moved with my taciturn granddad to their another home leaving a flat to my mother with curses. (however we visited them all the time, and in front of me my mum didn’t appear that they were strained to each other. It was just my grandmum’s lifestyle to have hysterical disputes with the daughter, for she herself had been grown up in a puritanical way and was deeply injured).
At that flat my conscious childhood began. First recollections concern some eating or medicative troubles my mum had with me. For instance, I was once sick having fed with semolina, another time she kind of threatened me with an enema for my refusing to eat something or to have some medication. I was sometimes beaten by her when refused to eat some food I couldn’t stand. That’s where my sexual anal and vomit-anomalies set in.
Dad lived with us sometimes. He used to do some odd carpentry and the sawdust was spreading all over the floor, on which I crawled and played. Seemingly, some of it got into my penis and caused an inflammation. In a local children’s medical center I then underwent a terrible painful incision without anesthesia, which, I presume, subsequently caused the big part of my sexual anomalies.
This children’s medical center as well became kind of a second home for me, my mother being overprotective on me. She led me there at every my minor ailment, where a row of painful surveys was waiting each time. At that age some lifetime illness in the area of my testicles began. They vainly cured something in the bladder, but now I know it was something in the prostate. I’ve read in psychiatric books a lot about the accent on the genital area in childhood and its linking with sexuality in adulthood, so I know it has left a significant trace.
The first love happened at a beach where I used to go in summer with parents. She, or, more precisely, they (for they were twins) were also frequenters there and so I fell in a secret love with them and proceeded to spying on them, always dreaming of making friends with them and playing together. I was 4, and it was the age when the footfetish and the fantasies of tickling settled in my head. This affection to the twins had led to nothing. For the record, at the age of 12 these twins would appear in my life once again.
Then I learned of death. Foreigners may deem it strange, but here in Russia it is common to keep deceased in flats some days, then on the day of burial to put coffins in front of the entrances of our stinky old ten-storeyed houses for some time so that all the people could bid farewell or something. So I witnessed such a ceremony at the age of late 3 or 4 for the first time, saw that yellowish face of the dead and was traumatized hard by the sight and thought, which had never troubled me in so conscious way. It seemed I had never been aware before that that everything ends, that my mum wouldn’t protect me endlessly and all that. I would always be very excited when saw some movie where a man died. I just wouldn’t put up the fact that such a thing is real.
The first day in the kindergarten was a shock, I sat all the day with a sack with toys from home and wept, never spoke to anyone that day and quite rarely afterwards. Never slept at a midday nap, unlike the others.
At the age of 5 climbing up a pillar at a playground I discovered an ability to get this funny feeling in genitals when tightly crossing my legs (without erection), which ended up in the natural way. But in my case then it connected with the thoughts of a psychologically irritative sort, like these thoughts about death, or some obsessive ideas like to tear apart some gift that I got for my birthday.
“Mortal combat” and other movies where the people died became the source of such tickling thoughts and sights, accompanied with my crossing-legs-masturbation. The other boys at kindergarten and at school appeared to notice nothing tragical in death phenomena. Let alone the sexual signals which I found in it. They only focused on those fighting techniques, monsters and all that. They even would let themselves joke about those things. I couldn’t understand how they could play those cruel videogames with their “fatalities” and all. They somehow moved on, while I stuck in that issue of the inevitable quitting this consciousness for good, that terrible cruelty and injustice, was afraid of the idea of my parents’ dying. I promised myself once one my parent dies, I’d take a hammer, break a window and jump out.
I used to beat and torture my cat. Once I went as far as to choke her. It fell on the floor and was lying still, I thought it was dead. Then it started to move and I stroked it and hugged and then I ran to the bedroom and wept. Fortunately, it was the most horrible thing I’ve ever done.
Through my early childhood all I was into was wildlife, reptiles and heavy encyclopedias, with which I was showered for my birthdays. Not having friends to go out with, I used to stay in our flat all the spare time, looking through my expensive terrariumistic books on and on.
It was then that my envy to everything english began. I mean, all the stuff which I was interested in, all those iguanas - it was all originated in the western world. I found the place where I lived (the city of Engels) a bald, absolutely uninteresting point of the Earth.
There were big english dictionaries on our book shelf at home and I tried to study them, or so I thought. I was taught to english since kindergarten everywhere, at pre-school, at school, had a few private lessons, even seemed to do well, but all in vain, as can be seen.
Despite mum’s efforts to enroll me at the best school in Saratov (bigger city across the river) and in various additional children’s classes, I was always falling short of her and my expectations. Not that I was slow, it just felt like I hadn’t enough motivation to do all that. It was like I was subconsciously aware that all that wouldn’t bring me happiness, as if I understood, even then, that all these dreams of me living in the western world, in my own house a great expert in reptiles, were some sort of schizophrenia, or at least some childish fad.
At the age of 6 or 7 there appeared “The Collector” by John Fowles on the book shelf at home. I wasn’t keen on reading (except dictionaries and encyclopedias with images), but this time the book was in a new cover, pleasant to touch, which was a sign for me it was worth reading. Having inquired of my father about its plot, I realized that it was my book.
I myself used to fall for girls everywhere. Every time in a secret way, of course, like it was in the beginning of “the Collector”. Not a single situation from kindergarten to a summer bus trip over to a seaside-resort passed without a girl I had affection to and dreamt of when was alone or went to bed. The dreams were of nothing nasty, just about friendship.
At the age of 8 I and my classmate at school revealed our feelings to one girl. Of course we were only kidding, we didn’t believe that a girl would mutually respond to a boy at that age. She proved our expectation actually, responding most coldly during the two years period of our harassment.
All those years I had a tough time at home, where I mostly lived with mum alone (Dad usually only joined us on holidays, which was ‘calm’ time). She was addicted to spanking as a method of teaching me, and to sudden screams at me. My refusals to eat some meals in early childhood, accidental swearing and, of course, bad grades were the causes for those shocking screams and punishment with a belt. But it wasn’t that severe flogging showed in movies, where parents-psychopaths beat so hard that children run away from home, where the parents don’t love their children at all and where parents are confident in what they do. Nay, my mum was a bit another case. When she went to the wardrobe to get the belt her hands and her voice would tremble. In my later childhood she would burst into tears and hysterical shrills into a pillow, once she lost her voice. I feared she might do something to herself. (and I think if it hadn’t been for the weird relations with her tutor from the university, which she maintained, she would have been even more desperate) Of course the flogging was very hurt and humiliating, but when it was weekends or holidays we became the best friends, we would go to the park or to the beach, would bake a pie and so on. She also would buy me nearly everything I wanted, though I didn’t ask for very expensive things, it would be just a toy, or a pet squirrel, or a visit to an exhibition of reptiles. But all the same I considered that as everything, I considered myself as lucky, and I believed that it would always be so. I mean that she would do everything for me, protect me, fulfill my wishes. It was a shock when I later started to realize that there are things she couldn’t do for me.
As for the masturbation with wringing legs, when I just started it I guessed at once it was bad, but I was not aware that my face gets red, so my mum soon noticed it and somehow figured out that I had some business with penis when I was alone in room, and she scolded me saying also that if I continue my penis would fall off. A couple of times she punished me with the belt for it too.
Well, at 9 sport came in the place of snakes and lizards. Mum enrolled me at gymnastics, to begin with it was only her intention and I didn’t want to and we had a row after the first day. But since the second day at the sport hall I was obsessed with it, although I wasn’t physically fit for this kind of sport. The sport obsession lasted for two years. The second year I insisted that my mum enroll me in the main sport hall in Saratov. It meant that I had to make a journey to the neighboring city twice a day (I went to school there too).
Meanwhile I learned of sex (I was 10), normal masturbation and all that, which for some reasons conflicted with my expectations from life. Then some breakdown on the bridge happened making commuting between the cities even harder; the heating in the tiny flat in Saratov that mum had bought to move there wouldn’t work; something like blood in my stool was found and led to a prolonged survey at that medical center; some important exercises in gymnastics I didn’t manage to do; one more girl who I liked and to whom I revealed my feelings didn’t show slightest interest, so, finally, all that broke me down. I left all those schools and sport and hopes. As for school, mum transferred me to a simple school near us in our city.
Then mum bought me a computer and I started to play in all those computer games which had come out by 2005. At the time the main game for me was GTA-Vice City. I was struck by that opportunity to live such an interesting life (which was again in english spoken world), and I was also struck by all the music which played on the radio in it. In fact, I soon became aware that it was the music that attracted me first of all. But the music in its turn was inseparable from the world where it originated. Even after my computer soon broke down, I would spent all day listening to the tape I had recorded with songs from the game, imagining me living in that world, in that virtual Miami. I didn’t actually do all those missions, I didn’t care about the plot of the game, about its numerous connections with what I had always been afraid of (adulthood, sex, death, etc.). For me it was just a fairytale, a dreamlike life, which had neither the beginning, nor the end.
I began to clean and disinfect things, at first my computer and keyboard, then proceeded to all my things, washed my hands fiercely. I had heard in biology classes about roundworms and the way they multiply (I was even convinced that I could get infected by a contact with my own feces), so I was determined to maintain perfect cleanliness of myself as possible.
I was 12. In early May, strolling with mum along the riverside, I saw those twins at a pier. I had noticed them at school before and found them pretty, but there on the pier standing so close to them, seeing and hearing them in informal situation I then and there fell in love with them once again.
This time I didn’t say or show anything to mum concerning my new affection (on a few previous instances I did).
Since spying and ‘following after’ were the only things I could allow myself, on the next day I was standing on the pier fishing, waiting for my twins. But they didn’t come. On the third day some pugnacious boy bullied me on that pier and it ended in the direst fight I’ve ever had. Nothing special, but I just all of a sudden realized that nobody cared about me. There were women with children on the pier, but they just hurried away instead of breaking up our fight, or something, as it had been at kindergarten and school. I imagined if the twins had appeared nearby and seen the fight, they would just have walked away not giving a damn.
I thought of killing that boy for some days, but eventually resigned myself to what happened.
All the following summer I almost didn’t go out because of my bacteriophobia. I would listen to the tape, read “The Collector” and nothing more.
At the end of that summer dad couldn’t stand the depressive atmosphere and left us for a whole year. In the following year mum at last eased the pressure on me concerning my education. At that time she also used to go to the river sometimes with an intention to drown herself, I’d follow her in tears, yet we’d always end up buying some cake for our idyllic evening at home.
She bought me the expensive mountain bike I always had been dreaming of, but on the first day I hit the tire and on the next ride I fell off and broke my arm in front of that bloody Lenin’s monument at the square. All the summer I didn’t leave our flat at all. I was only playing GTA, listening to american metal music of 80’s, looking at the images on foreign mountain-bike sites and guessing what the users were talking about on the forums there.
I refused to go to school in the following school year, which was the last year of our compulsory education for me. The thoughts of dying became more obsessive, I also began to agonize over thoughts about military service, which would have ripped me out of my accustomed life at home at the age of 18. My dad would twaddle that by my 18 there would be no military service, but he was just an carefree idiot. Anybody sane would say there would always be military service in Russia.
I had seen these movies about army, about war, I had seen the way our neighbor returned home in a freezer. I simply wasn’t going to let strangers do what they wanted to me, interfere in my life. I made agreement with myself concerning it too - I would throw myself out of the window as soon as there is a knock on my door when I’m 18.
My bacteriophobia was also at its wildest at that time.
In October of 2006 my kin on the father’s side arranged for me to be taken to a regional psychiatric clinic in a mean way, from where mum took me away a few days later. I’ve never wept like I did there.
But once you are registered with mental health care system, there is no turning back, everybody around became able to make a call and have you transferred to a clinic anytime.
I was obliged to live with dad and his mother for some time and they couldn’t stand my behavior (I’d swore at them, refuse to sleep at night, etc.), so during several months I lived in clinic much longer than at home, which was the worst time of my life for I knew I wasn’t schizophrenic and didn’t belong there, considered the clinic as a prison.
But dad’s mother however bought me a diploma of that compulsory education and, besides, all those trips to the clinic later helped me Mum to easily register disability and pension for me, which meant I didn’t have to dread military service any more, or study, work and, lastly, leave home if didn’t want to.
Another landmark of late 2006 was I changed my musical tastes and found a purpose in life, which endured through the next ten years. I had played that computer game TES:oblivon since early 2006, and then in the late fall in between those trips to the clinic I accidentally bought a tape with one scandinavian epic metal group and on the instant I realized that that was the thing I had been seeking all my life. I mean, a concept of fantasy world matching with that majestic tragic music and living some life in it. It was really to my taste and needed for me. I didn’t yet know anything about history, mythology, nor could I understand english lyric. I just concluded that there existed some such world where I could transfer myself by the means of composing my own songs in that style. That world and music somehow kind of linked with my memories from childhood, maybe with the film Conan and those snowy weekends which I sometimes spent at my grandmum’s sledding. I felt like I had always been taking part in it.
After the clinic’s period mum bought me a guitar. We also sold our flat and moved to a new one in a new-built house in a neighboring street and dad has never lived with us since then (he lives with his mother in a one-bedroom flat).
I was 14, I didn’t have to go to school any more, so I plunged into all this olden scandinavian and western-european stuff and music for two years.
Though I soon became quite disappointed because of its neo-pagan ideology, which I wanted nothing to do with and the variety of all these fantasy worlds (I discovered that the world of the game, of the mythology-based lyric on the tape, of The Lord of the Rings and of British folk were totally different) I anyway kept on self-deceiving and thinking I might find or kind of create my own world myself, taking that stuff as a model.
At composing music I was doing very well. Though not a skilful guitarist or a proficient in sound recording, I still knew for myself I was making the most catchy and tuneful melodies in the genre of music I listened to. I only listened to a few groups and found all the other music in that style an absolute rubbish, I didn’t understand why people loved it, didn’t understand in what way they loved the music and all the nordic stuff at all. I saw even then that there was a sheer difference between me and other people in perceiving it. Even between me and the musicians themselves who made the music, between me and other people playing that fantasy game and so on.
I still didn’t understand english. I’d read lyric in russian translations if I could find. To be honest, I didn’t give a damn about all those viking sagas, history, elfs, the plot of the game I played, etc. Every time I was reading lyrics of some group I wanted it to be something familiar to me and I always got disappointed when I learned what it was really about. That was why I didn’t have motivation to learn english. I didn’t read books, I had no interest. For me it was all in particular kind of melodies and those feelings that I derived from them. I would sit and look at pictures in Google Earth of scandinavian countries and fancied myself living in my own house in mountains, composing songs about some fantasy life which I’d somehow be living and so on.
I didn’t think about dying, didn’t think about any particular girl (forgot the twins). It was the happiest time in my life, the most tranquil and full of hopes. I still didn’t fully understand that there wasn’t any satisfying way of creating a world for me so that it might be both virtual and real.
During the period of 14-16 age I made various short-lived acquaintances on local music forums. In the first year I even was in a metal band, so I went out about once a week. But of course I didn’t share an interest in informal get-togethers, I didn’t have relations with anybody but in a formal way.
At the time my mum used to work as a cleaning woman in shops as an act of her self-abasement. She would wear shabby and dull clothes, she didn’t have any friends round or go out any more – all that was because her son turned out to be abnormal.
So I was alone at home every day and my sexual perverses were flourishing. I didn’t accept any porn but lesbian, especially that with milk enemas, footfetish, vomit and all. The same practices I did myself, going as far as to play with my feces. It seemed overcoming my fears was what excited me, not girls’ beauty or something normal. But it was so when I was at home only. When I was out and looking at girls in real I couldn’t think of anything nasty, I wanted them in a platonic way as usual.
Meanwhile I got crazy about the idea of moving to the north, closer to Europe, so at 16 I went to Saint-Petersburg for a few days, had my portion of living in a dirty dormitory with drunkards(couldn’t book anywhere else due to my age) and returned home to wait until I was legal age.
I was 17, three years had passed since I got obsessed with the idea to compose songs about something perfect in some perfect world with mountains, lakes and all, and I still didn’t know how to do it. I had lots of musical scratches, I already had enough skill to record a serious album, I only needed lyrics that I’d like to sing. Both ideas of instrumental album and hiring a lyrics maker were unacceptable, for they didn’t resolve the problem of not having a life and things I’d like to sing about. More than that, the lyrics were to be in english, for all the music and everything I loved was done by english-spoken world, I wanted nothing to do with anything from where I lived.
I envied all those bands of my genre seeing how they released albums with their crappy melodies. I couldn’t converse on musical forums and with a couple of my Net acquaintances any more. Every day I’d wake up hoping to do something but just ended up sitting all day long playing guitar and nothing else.
Finally I realized that the toilet lyrics about perverses and roundworms in russian was all that I was able to compose, and, besides, deserved to sing being the man that I was and living life the way I did.
In a few months’ time I did the job, recorded a couple of albums. The musical part, as I expected, turned out good and on the level of the music on that tape, which was a role model for me, and that was confirmed by audience (one label even released it on CD), so I at least managed to prove myself that I could have done serious album if it hadn’t been for my mental disorder.
I didn’t give up the illusory idea, though. I proceeded to compose music for next unserious album, hoping one day I could nevertheless find a solution. But in the meantime I felt something had happened to me earlier that year. I couldn’t ignore sights of all those couples in the street any more. They were already of my age. All my life I had been going to bed with the sweet and lulling dreams of me having mutual affection with some girl, but that were just dreams, that was possible in future and impossible at the moment because I was a child and not ready for such adult relations. And now it seemed to be already possible for real, seeing all those couples of my age, but still impossible in my particular case. Well, it’s hard to explain. Since those times I’ve been having insomnia.
Also, by that time ‘vkontakte’, a russian analog of Facebook, had evolved to such an extent of popularity and density of users that there were already countless profiles of girls with their photos, which I couldn’t stop myself looking at again and again.
A new high speed Internet connection provided me with the opportunity to watch films as much as I wanted. Those were romantic and art films (often semi-erotic), and sometimes about war. Adulthood, sex, death were the things that troubled me. I lacked courage, virility. I couldn’t live the real life in the real world and I failed to create some fictional one. I simply didn’t know how to move on for some time.
I was at last 18, I could buy sim cards, flats and so on, it was summer and I asked for the money my mum had saved up for me for my own flat and I set off for Kaliningrad region.
Prices for flats in SPB were high, so I figured I’d better settle in a quiet semi-european resort on the cost of the sea, than purchase papers (I had enough money to buy a flat only at the development stage) and sit waiting another couple of years at home for the sake of living in a big city afterwards without any particular purpose.
Being so far from home, communicating with realtors and roommates at the hostel, and, lastly, all those formal situations in the bank and carrying cash wasn’t a joke for me, but I managed.
It was a small flat in a sleepy town within a 5 minutes’ walk from the sea. I returned home to wait 7 months till the development was completed.
At the time my self-esteem began plummeting. I couldn’t ignore that some people of my age were already working, even girls, or they were in university (in Russia universities are free and every normal person generally studies there, so I was a complete dropout) to acquire a profession and that was because of the necessity to earn their living, while I could afford myself to lounge all the rest of my life caring about nothing, I had already everything.
During that period of waiting I was very busy with packing my things, for the forthcoming moving. My guitars, synthesizer, bicycle were to be protected against bacteria. Dad made special wooden boxes at his mother’s home in Saratov, so I was splitting between two houses and used to change buses in the district of the city’s main university, where most young people were accumulating. Once I noticed there one pretty girl and felt like to search for her profile on ‘vkontakte’. I failed to do it for there were tens of thousands girls in our city, but gradually I became obsessive with browsing girl’s accounts once again, only this time I got into a habit of writing to them from my fake account. Offering money, I asked for kissing, hugging and licking their feet. Nothing more.
One day all of a sudden one girl accepted my offer. She wasn’t a prostitute, just an ordinary girl of my age, quite pretty. (Afterwards, I realized it was an extraordinary luck, even a miracle, especially finding her almost first go). That ‘date’, which costed me $50, was the most daring thing I’ve ever done. On the way there I was feeling scared, I was shaking, nearly fainted. But the friendliness of the girl soothed me. We didn’t do any footfetish things, though. We just kissed, hugged, I stroke her and she let me touch and kiss her breasts, which was the first and the last sexual experience in my life. Most of all I liked that she smiled at me and waved her hand at me when we were parting. After the date I had platonic dreams about her for some time, but it didn’t last long, which was because she liked me anyway, she wasn’t picky. And I didn’t wanted to be liked as long as I was who I was.
I continued browsing girls’ accounts, adding some ones to the bookmarks. I was being eaten away with my immatureness and inefficiency in music, which I didn’t stop composing. Like that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from the film, with his striving for being loved through making a magical perfume, I, having resigned myself to the fact I was abnormal, wanted to create serious songs at least, to be a serious musician so that I could be proud of myself and could feel that I deserved love, the love of some demanding person.
At that time that computer game Skyrim also came out, but I didn’t even download it. I didn’t want any world or life but my own. I wanted my own mountains, woods, story and plot, system of life, my own music. No elfs, no these 3d people with their quests, no rules, no end, lastly. I wanted my own perfect world. But it wasn’t lunacy, for I clearly realized I fancied something nonexistent.
Finally I got that call from Kaliningrad and was to leave the homeland in a month’s time. I had nothing to lose, I was leaving my city anyway, so I decided to write something just insulting to those prettiest girls from my bookmarks.
Generally I got banned by girls right away, but one girl didn’t do anything in response to my nasty message. Then I wrote to her that she was very pretty and she replied ‘I know’. Then she wouldn’t reply again, just opened my messages, which was seen. Then I got chained to the screen. I began to send her messages one by one.
Well, I could write about those days and moments indefinitely, but since it is a brief story, I should note only the most important points.
After a few days of my sending messages to her I felt terribly humiliated by what was going on with me. I hadn’t been ready to such an indifference to me (she didn’t even ban me, as I said), so at one point I upped and wrote I loved her on my penis and took a photo of it when I came (though it wasn’t her that I looked at to get excited) and sent it to her. I thought she would throw me into the black list at last, but that made no difference.
Her brief personal info, twitter, comments to her photos, saved pictures, music, video-clips and her posts on the ‘wall’ helped me to find out quite plenty about her. She was studying English in university. She definitely lived somewhere in Saratov’s downtown (I somewhat envied those who lived there). She was sort of up-to-date person, not like me, my parents and environment. She had real friends, they met, walked together. She went to night-clubs and bars where they served those cocktails (I myself have never understood alcohol, hookahs, easy-drugs and all). She liked Kurt Kobein, Chuck Palahniuk, movies like Pulp Fiction and all this stuff. She even had a bit of a scratchy, rude air about her, but you could see it was a mask, she didn’t seem dissolute or wicked at all. She was erudite, sharp-witted and polite, she read and loved complicated literature like Dostoevsky (which I’ve never understood or been interested in). Some might say she was an ordinary girl. That’s true, but for me she was exceptional, for she kind of represented everything I thought I would have had if I’d been normal. She wasn’t ashamed of having these sex organs and desire, like I was. She used taxis, I could see she wasn’t a miser like me. She’d been to London once.
Eventually I learned her father died not long time ago and I felt even worse. First of all I felt really sorry for her, I imagined I were her friend and how I’d console her and so on. Secondly, I was ashamed of myself, for the loss of a parent was still one of my greatest fears and I couldn’t imagine myself moving on like she was. I was completely broken.
I begged her to talk with me, even wrote from my real account (so she knew my real name, though still didn’t see my photo or birthdate). I found out her name. Daria (or Dasha).
It lasted a week or two and then when I mentioned my age she all of a sudden began questioning me, who I was and so on. I revealed all the true facts about me. But it was a fleeting interest and she didn’t write to me after that, and I didn’t either because I was preparing to the moving.
At my new place I didn’t want to do anything, I was deeply depressed. I left all the boxes with my things at home, took only the computer, guitar and blankets, which I spread right on the cement floor (the flat was bare). I only installed a simple shower basin on bricks best I could myself (didn’t want to have dealings with people) and nothing else. Plastic bags were for a toilet. I sat on the floor all the time in front of the screen, wrote insulting messages to girls, composed music, watched films and masturbated. During three months there I only went to the beach a few times. A couple times I wrote to Dasha. Nearly every day I skyped with mum. Some money was again available and we decided to sell my flat and try Saint-Petersburg.
In the beginning of summer 2012 I bought a studio-flat in SPB and returned home (the completion was dew in next year). I began to ‘ail’ over Dasha with new vigor, every day I wrote to her, even asked to meet her on various pretexts, but she was dodging. I guessed she might have a boyfriend, and, of course, she had no slightest interest, I was just an annoying insane to her, she’d never write me first and sometimes she’d say I was slow (who I actually was as compared to her quick-wittedness). She’d have banned me, but she couldn’t because of her well-manners or something.
Eventually I persuaded her to ban me, though I soon continued messaging anonymously. After 2013 New Year I revealed myself and she unblocked me, my account even got into her friend list somehow and one day she even offered to talk with her, but I think she was acting. At the time she already definitely had a boyfriend.
I found out where she lived, it was the downtown, as I expected. I went there a few times, circling around her home, all anxious (I was feeling like I was doing something wrong and, besides, I was afraid of a situation like that on the pier), but to no result.
At the time she became more and more mature in my eyes. She was already having practice at school as an English teacher, whereas I stayed at home all the time, had no progress in my music project, couldn’t understand english grammar and so on. We were both 20 years old.
One day in March when I was in Saratov hoping to see her I did succeed at it and I followed her at a distance to the school where she practiced. It was the only time I’ve ever seen her.
When I moved to SPB in summer I was really going to kill myself, my house being 20-storey, I even let my mum know by phone and tore my passport and documents, but couldn’t even come near the edge and in the morning the police arrived and had me hospitalized, which I guess was arranged by mum, although she denies it. My mum came to SPB to free me from the clinic. Of course no one knew anything about Dasha, about my desire to create a perfect life to sing about, nor would have understand the conception of deserving love through achieving goals, so they just pumped me with neuroleptics as usual.
We sold our flat in our hometown and bought new one in SPB, which was developing until new year. A few months I lived by myself again and I found a job in an online-sexshop as a courier to occupy my time. For three months I was running all over the city, without days off because the pay was good, but finally I got depressed again and quit the job.
In 2014 we moved to the new flat, where we live now, and sold the studio. Then we bought a new flat, which was due next year. I believed my mum would like to live here with me in one city, besides, she herself seemed uncertain what to do and how to live. But eventually she just got more and more depressed in this city and turned living with her into a hell. She was always crying and depressed because of local supermarkets’ food, which she considered as synthetic.
I worked as a courier, only this time money was very serious, I earned as much as the average businessman, so I nearly forgot myself for two years. I worked for about 15 employers at a time and of course most of them turned out to be engaged in illicit activities like money-laundry – that’s why I earned so much and closer to the end even got caught by the police and spent three days in a cell. But I didn’t care, nothing made any sense. Years went by and I still didn’t have any ideas as to what the lyrics of my songs might be about (I’d already composed thousands musical scratches by that time) and Dasha couldn’t be a friend to me.
She graduated and became an English teacher. I wrote to her from time to time, composed simple songs about my unanswered loving her and my perversions. I asked her to give me english lessons, to act a friend for money, to skype with me, etc. but all in vain. I’ve never heard her voice. She never wrote me first and she answered very irritatedly and mostly in yes/no or a few words. I found out that her boyfriend was a programmer and a translator, so they entirely matched each other. In 2015 she herself got CPE certificate in english, which implied her english was on the level of that of the educated native speaker (and she was only 22!). I ceased to write anything to any other girls or browsing their pages. Dasha was the onliest.
I never insulted her, but in summer 2015 I became very desperate and let myself to write insultings to her and she blocked me everywhere.
In summer 2015 I also was listening to some scottish folk singers, and I liked the romantic titles of their songs, got interested to know what the lyrics was about, but that inevitably required understanding english and I started to learn it while I had little breaks from running around the city with illegal papers.
Scottish folk with its pastoral, nearly idyllic lyrics turned out to be very to my taste, I got more and more into it. I even thought I had found my thing at last, imagined me composing songs about admiring girls in that peaceful rural setting, like Robert Burns, even my insomnia eased a bit, but I didn’t yet quite realize that I was still the same man. I reckoned I was becoming a better man since I was listening to that music and interested in that stuff, but in fact my disorder just kept on developing. I even worked for obvious fraudsters, and got to a cell, as I said, I didn’t care about people, I insulted girls in public transport, got into various quarrels with people, I pitied myself because of my feeling so lone, I wanted to live somewhere else, somewhere in Scotland on the shore of a lake all alone in my own house and making music with english lyrics not having any desire that I couldn’t satisfy, like that sexual one.
Dasha hadn’t answered me anywhere since summer and it was already the spring of 2016. I wrote to her messages from every email and account I had.
Eventually I got the idea of composing lyrics about killing girls, giving up dreams of lyrics in english, moreover at that time I was reading a book about sexual maniacs and psychopaths and I clearly understood that I was just like them, I resigned myself to the idea I was a freak, I had freak-developing childhood and it couldn’t be changed.
I quit all my well-paid jobs, and let my mum go to our hometown, we even thought she would settle there, for she had become a real drama queen, a hysterical hypochondriac, living here with me in SPB, the city which she hated.
Dasha, having not replied for nearly a year, all of a sudden got in touch again. Maybe her ignoring me had been a kind of punishment, I don’t know. She tends to not explain her actions.
I was enlivened with the zeal to make some songs after such a long period. During the summer I recorded the music for 10 songs. The three months were the last happy time in my life. Then it was a turn of making the lyrics and at this point something changed in me and I got depressed as never before. At the time Dasha took a job in some big software development company, she also went on a trip here to SPB with her boyfriend (I asked where they were staying to get opportunity to spy on them, but she didn’t say). I could see she wasn’t some young girl any more, she was already a mature person, while I was still a worthless infantile masturbating at perverted porn with a cucumber in my ass, I realized it wasn’t youth any more, and I could never walk together with her or with any other girl being young, in a teenage manner, as I’d fancy it (and how it was possible and relevant) in 14-20 age. I always fancied a girl of precisely my age only, my peer, and my peers were already mature individuals. They didn’t fill their accounts with photos and updates like it had been in youth and so on. And I myself couldn’t overlook my youth’s passions fading. In other words I felt totally fallen behind, disillusioned and lonely.
Having been broken so hard, I gave up the idea of maniac lyrics and recording music and again plunged into reading romantic poetry and books like “Pride and Prejudice”.
In September I managed to compose and record a simple song in scots english about my love obsession, I even made a video with me in it and I sent it to Dasha, which resulted in a small conversation where she herself asked me some questions (which was extremely rare) and she also send me a couple of new photos of her.
In October another ‘big’ conversation occurred. On one my ordinary boring question, she all of a sudden began going on about my virginity, asking why I didn’t want to do something about it, why I didn’t want to change myself and so on, and in a couple of days I sank into self-pity, which she couldn’t stand, and she blocked me again.
My mum returned back. I did some mistake with my money and lost $3500 of my savings, which was a huge blow to my already broken self-esteem. Since then I have been leaving home once a month.
I again began to read “The Collector”, psychiatric books about perverts and all that stuff. I also commenced that huge diary of my life with deep psychological researches. These researches helped me to understand my infantile and unmanly nature, which finally made it clear that there had never been any means to be a normal man for me. Even outwardly I almost have no hair on the breast, I’m thinner than a child, especially in hands and my voice is childish. Back then when I met that girl to kiss I was smiling all the time, which is a childish feature too. I noticed on photos Dasha tends to not smile at all, likewise other mature people who I saw in films and in life.
I continued to send enormous emails to Dasha, receiving no response. I was trying to explain to her that I wasn't to be blamed, that I was just a victim of circumstances, a mama's boy, who would have ‘extinguish’ in a natural way through some suicide or in prison, if it hadn’t been for the parents and the clinics meddling in my life, which helped me to avoid living a real cruel life in society.
I thus agonized until after 2017 New Year’s holidays and since then I have been studying that english grammar every day from morning till night. Now I’m only do it so as to feel myself doing the same things that Dasha did. I don’t want to make songs about anything any more. There is nothing to sing about. There isn’t any world, system of life which I could tolerate. All those folk songs and poetry is based on the real life. I still enjoy listening to that music because of its melodies, which transfer me to the past when I was happy, but I don’t want to sing about all those things myself, about love, for it’s connected with sex, which for me is as cruel as death itself.
In March Dasha wrote to me, all of a sudden, as usual, and we talked for a couple of hours. She said it was about time I visited a doctor and so on.
She simply doesn’t understand what psychiatrists in clinics are and what their medication cures. Or, more exactly, she doesn’t quite understand what my problems are like (I’m sure she didn’t read all those my emails with explanations). I’m perfectly healthy mentally. I mean I of course have a severe depression, but it doesn’t grow out of nowhere, or of some genes. It grows out of my psychological disorder, which, in turn, out of my past with bringing up by infantile father and hysterical mother and that past cannot be cured. I have no hallucinations, visions and all that. Dasha is not a maniacal obsession for me, but a conscious choice. Her attitude towards me is an estimation of my value. I’d always been seeking for a female like her.
In short, I am not going to have anything to do with psychiatric, pills and chemicals.
And I’m neither a misogynist nor a misanthrope or a cynic, though it may seem so. I’ve just got such a self-pity that it is impossible for me to live in harmony with this cruel life order.
Now I feel just like I am one of those cowardly bad guys in films, who are afraid to die, like me, and in the end they get it in the most painful and horrible way. Maybe it was those war movies (in particular the russian film ‘The 9th Company’ which I first saw when I was 12) and the prospect of military service that triggered my anxiety to develop to such a level.
I’ve been sheltered too much in my childhood and had no bad happenings that would have harden me.
Now I am still a bacteriphob, my insomnia is a hell and I lie beside the screen all the time, leaving home once a month. I don’t want to talk with anyone (except Dasha, if she will).
Because of two years of working, in the subway and public transport in the cold, I seem to have got some sinus related disease and as a result I often get a fever and headaches, especially after being outside, and a carrion stench comes out of my mouth. I don’t want to do anything with it. I simply don’t have a motivation. My mum is the same, she doesn’t want to get any therapy, her 15-years-old sinusitis is already at the stage of necrosis, she wants to die. We both have no motivation for anything at all. We’ve got no furniture in our flat, we have lived without a refrigerator for 5 years, without doors, without a proper flush toilet, etc. We’ve got money, but even shopping takes efforts. We don’t clean our flat. That’s all about not having a motivation.
I’ve been obsessed with Dasha for more than 5 years and last time I wrote to her she said that I am a stranger for her. She means she doesn’t even consider me as an acquaintance of hers. That’s the worst thing for me. She is the only person with whom I want to have acquaintance but the reality is the exact opposite.
I never saw any point in living real life, except if having some mutual affection with a girl. But that’s not possible for me as long as I don’t have resignation to the cruelty of life. The plan B in the mission of achieving happiness was to create a dream world and dream but it also turned out to be impossible.