Speaking of time, correspondence with one girl named Yulia helped me to shorten it. She once wrote me via ICQ, looking for someone to talk to. As it turned out, she “lived” in a boarding school due to poor vision, and was a little younger than me. We spoke with her on completely different topics with absolute honesty. After a couple of months of such correspondence, which, as it turned out, she did not conduct with me alone, we exchanged our photos and decided to meet somewhere. Then suddenly her mother called, who was a salesperson in a food store as I recall, and began to ask questions about my education. She hung up when I said that I was not studying anywhere yet. Yulia said that she was ashamed of the call of her mother, and our communication soon went to naught.
While we were still texting one another, there was one funny case when Yulia did not put a question mark at the end of the sentence which looked to me like a negative statement. We almost started to quarrel over this, but then we realized that it was just a missed punctuation mark. We laughed, and everything returned to normal.
A little time ago, another incident happened in my life when people refused to understand me. I was putting cans up on the shelve in one of the stores, and a woman who worked there as a supervisor began to talk with me. It was a pleasant conversation until she asked me about my education. Upon learning that I was not studying anywhere, she immediately said something negative and condemning, then turned around and walked away. Like Yulia’s mother, she did not give me a chance to explain the reason why I did not officially study anywhere – that I wanted to study, but since I was interested in a lot of things in life, I simply did not know where to go; that studies required money that I earned by arranging products in her store; that I was studying English every day and finished what I missed in the last grades of the school…
There were times when I cried during difficult moments. I am not ashamed of this, because such moments helped me to understand that I was still a human being with feelings. Awareness of this helped me to gather my courage and gave me an impulse to move on through life.
But I was not an angel either. After Yulia, another girl wrote to me. She was a basketball player. We did not talk with her as actively as with Yulia. I remember one stupid thing that I wrote to her, answering her question about why I did not look for a girl in Russia, and I wrote then: “What for? To fuck her and then dump her?” – it was absolutely wrong thinking at many levels. I understood the contradiction of these words to my moral principles many years later… That basketball player wrote me another message, asking me if I was afraid of women. Now, when I am not afraid to know and remember the truth about myself, I understand that my answer should have been positive.
We met every Wednesday at McDonald's near Tverskaya metro station with other merchandisers and superiors in order to receive salaries and do other merchandiser things.
I would not be myself if I did not start liking a young girl who recently began working as a merchandiser in that company again. I do not know if she noticed this somehow, but once, after one of the guys in our company did not go to work and was waiting for the other merchandiser girl, that pretty girl playfully asked me: “And you’re waiting for me?” – unfortunately, having finished my business, I just got up smiling at her, said goodbye to everyone and went to work. I do not think I thought much about the crowd of people then, but I was definitely embarrassed by our supervisor woman, as I thought it would not be very professional to spend working hours right in front of the boss. Alas, I did not try to find out the phone of that pretty girl who was interested in me even though I had no hair then…
If you carefully read this book, you can recognize at this moment the repetition of history… I will come back to this topic later.
As for that girl, soon that same pretty guy began flirtatiously flirting with her, showing some figures on his hands. She clearly noticed this, and I, in turn, noticed that I had once again made a mistake. I tried to alleviate sadness with the thought that I was still going to leave Russia, and the girl would only be an obstacle, and her smoking also helped me not to worry too much. But how long was I destined to live with this new lie?
I think it is worth mentioning that I met girls working in a store that I came up to talk to. With one we even had a very good and pleasant conversation while we were waiting for the store to open, along with many other merchandisers standing nearby. Then I was not shy at all to speak with that sweet girl in a crowd of people. But in the store, she got colder and began to ignore my flirting. Then I did not know that Orthodox believers wear an engagement ring on their other hands than Catholics. Another girl ignored me, but the next day she talked playfully with someone, and most likely she was simply taken and did not communicate with other guys. The third one simply complained about a lot of work and ignored me, but what was a little upsetting to me was that the next day she was almost flirting and talking to a guy who had hair and, most likely, looks.
I remember when I first started working as a merchandiser, a fairly plus size woman who was older than me tried to flirt with me. But what turned me away were her facial expressions, which did not seem healthy at all. Unfortunately, I did not think then that I myself could look like that in the eyes of other people when I was not completely relaxed.
In the end, I continued to walk on the deliberate path, wanting to start everything from scratch in another country and forget about everything bad that had ever happened to me in Russia.
Despite my self-deception, I was still able to discover one of the simple truths for myself. Returning home from work, I often found myself thinking that I was lost again in my head: dreaming, thinking and talking to myself – I often thought through different variations of events in my head, and how I could act in each of them. Tracing the reason for my constant withdrawal into myself, I realized that the beginning were often thoughts about what to do in the future – for example, on the same day. I decided to try not to bother myself about what will happen when this or that event occurs, but simply to initially put in my mind a general plan of action and solve the details as they materialize. The effect of this decision was amazing! My productivity increased, as my mind was freed from garbage, and I could spend the freed up resources of the mind on a quick and correct assessment of the situation, and on the subsequent making of right decisions.
But there were days when I returned from work and could not get out of myself. And I thought why? Previously, I managed to do this, but here I seemed to have forgotten everything. I soon realized that the reason was in my thinking about the need to live in the present instead of actually living in the present. These are two opposite things, one of which is a characteristic feature of a focused mind on reality, and the other is a feature of the mind of a person who is living in his inner world.
Having cleared my mind, I noticed something else… During my readings about UFOs, I came across a story that said that aliens consider us not very smart, to put it mildly. I do not know if that story was true or not, but after many meditations, I began to work almost all day with my five senses and pay attention to what was happening in reality. I realized that a great many people were absorbed in their minds even while walking along a sunny spring street. This was the first time when I saw that I was not the only person who was absorbed in his mind when it was not required to be done. Yes, most of those people were not lost in themselves as much as I was lost a couple of years ago, but one way or another they also made a mistake – I was not alone.
I often recalled that I had lost four years of my life because of empty fantasies – I say empty because there are only two worlds on which our consciousness can be concentrated per unit of time: the external (the reality that we feel with the help of our five senses) and the inner (fantasies, memories, thoughts). Then I realized that if we take the age of sixty years, for example, I still had to live two-thirds of my life, and given the fact that fourteen years of that third were childhood, I still had a lot of time to enjoy life. I was able to reassure myself that even though I lost those years of my life, I gained invaluable experience which, as someone might say, tempered me no worse than the army. It is a pity that optimism was always replaced by a depressive state every time I came across a mirror… and the coming long years of life, which had just given me so much joy, almost instantly changed their polarity, and I could no longer live with the thought that I had to live my whole life with my scars…
Soon it became very clear to me that I could not save up money to study