processing SAROV
When I think about this, I remember how my friend Anya once cried on a bench by our building’s entrance in Chertanovo—crying because no one will ever truly understand another person. In grief, it seems to me, there is a particularly deep sense of that kind of loneliness. The pain I feel right now, curled up next to the fridge, choking on my tears; the pain with which I stare at the kitchen knife in my hand, trying with all my might not to move so I don’t cut myself right here and now; the pain that has made my favorite songs unbearable—this pain is mine alone.
Even a year and a half after their deaths, I sometimes pick up my phone thinking I should send Grandma a photo of that stray cat, or tell her about the recent thunderstorm in Helsinki. I think about bragging to my grandfather that I still want to get my PhD. But their phones aren’t just gone—their numbers have become someone else’s. Their apartment is empty.
Grief is something far greater than simply living through loss. Loss is only the first stage. What follows is the endless, agonizing acceptance of the fact that your life has changed forever, and that this grief will remain with you forever, a counterform, because emptiness itself is also a form. It is not just the loss that is agonizing, but the painful contrast between their absence from life and their simultaneous presence in my memory; they have become a part of me, they are among those who made me who I am, and they will always be real to me, because my memories are also part of reality. All the more terrible is the impossibility of fully reaching these thoughts and memories, all the more terrible is the feeling that they are being erased from memory and fading. Their death is a wall between what was and what is, a sign that nothing, never, no one will be as before.
I mourn my grandmother and grandfather;
I mourn Sarov, the warm roofs of the garages, the crocodile swing, the long-sold vegetable garden with its crooked wooden house and a bathtub filled with blooming water;
I mourn the embankment where pine trees stand around a burned-down house, where I can go if I’m in Sarov, but it won’t mean anything anymore;
I mourn the fact that all of Sarov no longer means anything to me, because no matter how much I walk there, by evening my grandmother won’t open the door for me;
I mourn our old apartment on Myachkovsky boulevard, the address of which—right down to the intercom and landline number—I can still recite without a hitch;
I mourn the smell of chlorine in the “Atlant” pool on Talalikhina Street;
I miss the tablespoon I left on the computer power supply in the lecture hall on the second floor of the HSE Design School;
I miss my small manga collection, which I threw away when my family and I moved because I was afraid my mom would judge me.
I grieve because I will never experience again what I felt in those moments.
Everything inside me is rotting with terrible guilt, because I could have written to them more often, I could have visited more often, I could have, I could have, I could have loved them more, I could have kept them from feeling so lonely in recent years. It’s agonizing, and it’s more agonizing than anything I’ve ever felt. This guilt and this remorse make me avert my gaze from sharp objects and not look at the tracks in the subway, because the desire to end it all is sometimes so strong that the only thing left for me to do is pass out from the leftover antipsychotics they gave me in the ER at the beginning of the year. This guilt is unbearable; this guilt spills over onto the people who have stopped talking to me because of how difficult a person I’ve become because of it, and onto those who haven’t stopped yet and are trying to talk. I don’t want to die; I know they wouldn’t want that, I know it would bring my family even more grief, but sometimes it’s so unbearable that I don’t know how to go on living.
august 2025