Dear friend, 

it’s been a while since we had last spoken. It feels special to talk to you again, as if I am coming home. There is quite a bit I wish I had said, and had done differently, but that is in the past. Today, on a day when I am most grateful to you, I had to write. In a hope that you hear and perhaps, on a different level, even manage to understand me in one way or another. 

The first time she felt something off was around Christmas.

 A few months later, the evening before her 20th birthday, she was coming home from a long day full of lectures and classes she taught herself, and instead of a familiar tinge of excitement, she stood in front of the door to the apartment complex, hesitating to walk inside.

She woke up and saw a bold young man feeding a huge copper-coloured rat little pieces of what looked like an apple.

The night slowly emerged in her memory but not the part of her falling asleep on a couch right in front of the bar counter. How does one even fall asleep when there are people dancing around to Russian rap set so loudly the walls of the small one-storied building vibrate vigorously to the rhythm? Studying for the Latin exam a few nights long, between working and going to this bar every day, must have done the trick.

I went for a run today. It was a decent run, 7 km, at a very respectable speed and sweat production rate. The run wasn’t special, I suppose, it was what came with it that mattered. The side effects of this cure for the body, which touched the mind. The longer I ran, the further away the stiffness in the neck and the squinting of the eyes seemed to be. I felt… well, not much. In the whirlpool that our lives are, my mind, even if just for a respectable time of 40 minutes, stood still.