Candentia

Sometimes it seemed to her that her entire personality was built on the ability to obsess over things beautifully.

It did not really matter what became the object of it.

A man. A book. A city. A phrase overheard by chance.

She loved the moment when desire became stronger than everything else.

In those periods, she liked herself especially much: alive, beautiful, free — so real that it almost made it difficult to behave properly.

And what she liked most was not getting what she wanted, but entering that state where everything inside her was already reaching toward it.

He, of course, loved that light at first.

It was pleasant to stand in it: to be seen so intently, as if he had finally been pulled out of the shared darkness and called by his name.

But then something in her attention became too precise. Not even a demand, more like a presence.

And he began to step back. Like a man who had walked up to the fire himself, and then got frightened that the flame knew the shape of his body.

Sometimes it seemed to her that he wanted to be desired, but not found.

He wanted to be the centre, but not the place where someone had truly arrived.

And still, she did not consider it a mistake.

She liked that she knew how to look like that. To want like that. To choose like that.

Even if someone later became frightened by their own reflection in her attention.

She did not want to make herself smaller just so it would be easier for someone else to breathe.

After all, her obsession had never been a request to stay.

It was rather a way of proving to herself that she was still capable of burning.

She had always been in a continuous dialogue with herself.

Not an inner monologue — no. A dialogue.

With objections, pauses, sudden clarifications, funny remarks to the side, and long explanations that no one but her had ever asked for.

Sometimes it seemed to her that this conversation did not even end when she fell asleep. It simply grew quieter, moved into another register, like music behind a wall.

She could be walking down the street and suddenly answer herself out loud. She could place a cup on the table and say, "of course." She could be alone in a room and still continue arguing with someone to whom, in reality, she had not said anything for a very long time.

Her loneliness had never been empty.

It was inhabited by voices, versions, questions, future letters, unsaid phrases, and small trials in which she was at once the accused, the witness, the lawyer, and the judge.

Perhaps that was why she was so rarely bored.

Even silence beside her was not silence.

She would simply sit down across from herself — and the conversation would go on.

With other people, something strange sometimes happened to her: a few words in a shop, a casual conversation in a coffee place, someone's gesture — and for a second, the world came closer.

The world became large again.

Not necessarily kind, not necessarily understandable, but alive. A world one could step back into, even if that same morning it had seemed better to stay home and not speak to anyone.

She knew how to come back to life from someone else's warmth. From a brief human precision. From the fact that someone, by chance, happened to be there at the exact moment when she needed confirmation: yes, life was still here.

With him, it was more complicated.

Next to him, she almost constantly felt insignificant.

A brilliant choice, of course, for a grown woman: to find a man beside whom your personality, your achievements, your taste, your mind, and every attempt at being free suddenly fold themselves into one small, anxious lump.

One could call it love, perhaps, if there had not been so much self-erasure in it.

What hurt most was that she brought herself to that place every time.

She was the one who gave him the scale that made her smaller.

She built the altar herself — and then wondered why she had to look up from below.

There had always been a wide gap in her life between letters and reality.

In letters, he was more precise, more tender, more attentive. There, he knew how to answer in exactly the right way. There, silence was meaningful, gestures were fateful, distance was beautiful.

In reality, he sometimes stepped out of the role she had written for him herself. And that was especially awkward: there was no one to accuse except her own imagination.

And the whole universe she had built would suddenly begin to creak with embarrassment.

It did not even collapse.

Worse.

It became visible.

She saw how much she had brought into it herself. How much she had invented. How much she had drawn in between two of his sentences, one look, and a pause that, perhaps, had meant nothing at all.

There was something devastatingly female in it: to write the novel herself, to cast the man as the main character herself, and then to be surprised that he had not learned his lines.

Because of this, next to him, she felt small and ashamed.

Shame always came later.

When the first heat subsided and it became clear how much she had managed to build out of thin air.

Not even out of lies — out of expectation, out of beauty, out of her own ability to love before there were any grounds for it.

After all, what is shame, if not the moment when you are caught at the scene of the crime — inside your own hope?

If someone asked her what she knew how to do best, she would probably say: love.

Not right away, of course. First she would make a joke, change the subject, say something about work, taste, or the ability to pack a suitcase quickly.

But if she had to answer honestly — love.

She knew how to love intensely. Sometimes too much. Sometimes in a way that made it difficult to tell tenderness from the instinct to survive.

There was a lot in her that could hardly be called convenient. Stubbornness, impatience, sharpness, a quick temper, the desire to understand at once who was honest, who was dangerous, and who simply spoke beautifully.

He, of course, did not see all of this.

He received fragments: a few hours, one evening, a short trip, a quarrel, a reconciliation, a conversation in which she had time to live through a catastrophe, while he simply remained inside his familiar order.

With him, everything seemed to stay under control. Even the quarrels did not quite belong to him.

She quarrelled with herself: with his pauses, with his intonations, with what she had managed to invent between two messages, with the version of him she herself had seated across from her.

It would be wrong to say those fragments were beautiful. Sometimes there was enough drama in them, enough sharpness and her own helplessness, to take a long time to recover afterwards.

But they were still fragments. Flashes, not a life.

She rarely reached him whole.

Not with her tiredness, her morning face, her irritation, her tenderness without decoration, her sudden silences, her hunger, her foolish questions, and all that ordinary daily life which cannot be sustained by desire alone.

And not with the way things around her were always falling, breaking, spilling, getting lost, ending up out of place. She could accidentally knock over a glass, drop something, leave a trace where, before her, everything had stood straight and silent.

There was too much movement in her for someone else's order. She irritated not only with words, but with the very way she occupied space: a little louder, a little more chaotic, a little more alive than was comfortable for a person used to things staying where they were.

He protected himself from that.

From the prolonged presence of a woman. From her voice in the next room. From her things left behind not as a sign, but simply because life sometimes leaves things behind. From that amount of closeness after which a person stops being an image and becomes a fact.

He always knew how to step back in time. To call it circumstances, tiredness, work, the need for silence.

In a certain sense, he really did take care of himself.

Very consistently.

Almost artfully.

As the president of her country once said: if a fight is inevitable, you must strike first.

She had learned that far too well.

It was unbearable for her to wait for the blow.

She could attack first. Say something harsher than she had meant to. Strike the very place where she herself would later want to rest her head. Turn fear into movement, pain into a lunge, tenderness into a weapon, if it suddenly seemed that she was about to be hurt.

But leaving first was exactly what she did not know how to do.

She kept reaching for him. Even when she should have stopped. Even when that movement left less and less dignity in her, and more and more of that unbeautiful hope one later has to hide from oneself.

And still, there was more love in her.

It showed through everything: through pride, through hurt, through the sharp phrases with which she was protecting not anger, but the most vulnerable place inside herself.

Even in her anger, there was almost always love, only in another form. Not white, not meek, but hot, scorched, with blood on its hands and the eyes of someone who still had not learned how to be indifferent.

Perhaps that was why it was not easy to be beside her.

She did not know how to love coolly.

In her love, someone was always surviving, someone surrendering, someone laughing, someone packing their things, someone coming back for the last sentence.

But if one were to look honestly, beneath all that aggression there was always the same thing: a monstrous, almost indecent capacity to attach herself to the living.

She could strike first.

But she loved first anyway.

In reality, it was obvious to her: she did not know him.

Not the way you know a person with whom you live through mornings, evenings, illness, irritation, the silence after a bad day, someone else's habits, the smell of their pillow, the way they get angry over small things and choose flowers for his mother's birthday.

She knew him in scraps.

By phrases, by pauses, by the way he looked when he wanted to seem calmer than he was. By rare tenderness. By disappearances. By that strange coldness that sometimes appeared in him without warning.

And for a long time it seemed to her that a person could be assembled from those scraps.

Of course he could.

From a few lines, you can draw a face too, if you want badly enough to see that particular face.

She saw only the part of him he brought to her. Or allowed her to notice. Or failed to hide in time.

It was probably easier for her to think that this was simply how he was made: closed-off, elusive, a little cruel in his ability to remain separate. Although perhaps it was not easier for him either. Perhaps he, too, lived inside some narrow system of his own, where closeness quickly became a threat, and freedom was the only way not to disappear.

But those were already guesses.

And she knew how to turn guesses into almost anything: into meaning, into a letter, into an excuse, into a sentence, into a beautiful sadness.

The truth was simpler and more unpleasant.

She did not know him.

And he, perhaps, knew her better than she wanted to admit.

Not entirely, of course. Neither of them ever belonged to the other whole.

But he had seen enough.

He had seen her in different states: funny, sharp, in love, drunk, unbearable, too alive, too demanding, sometimes beautiful, sometimes the kind of person one wants to close the door on and sit in silence for a while.

He could be wrong about her too.

Draw conclusions too quickly. Take one version of her for the whole of her. Not always understand where, in her, there was truth, and where there was only pain, exhaustion, alcohol, jealousy, fear, a bad temper, or simply too long a day.

But did she understand herself any better?

There was no one to blame in this.

They simply looked at each other from a distance where much can be seen, but much still has to be imagined.

And still, he gave her a great deal.

Not peace. No. Peace, somehow, had failed from the very beginning.

But movement. Air. Material for letters. A reason to look at herself more closely than before. A reason to be angry, to laugh, to want, to wait, to be awful, to be tender, to be alive to the point of embarrassment.

Perhaps it was not knowledge in the strict sense of the word.

But it was presence.

Uneven, incomplete, sometimes painful.

And still strong enough for so much of her to come out of it.

For a long time, she tried to dim her sensitivity to the world.

To bury it deeper. Cover it more tightly. Grow a protective layer, learn to answer calmly, look steadily, stop flinching at intonations, stop looking for meaning where, perhaps, no one had left any.

Never, ever be the first to feel again.

Not to reach.

Not to guess.

Not to hear the air change between two people before either of them had managed to say anything out loud.

Sometimes she truly wanted to become simpler. Not less intelligent — no. Just less permeable. The kind of woman the world would hit a little more often, and pass through a little less.

And then she would see people.

Different people. Sad, serious, terribly composed. Those who had long ago learned not to show anything excessive, who held their faces so well it looked less like expression and more like a profession.

People who had hidden their feelings behind a hundred masks: politeness, sarcasm, busyness, status, exhaustion, correct answers, good manners, the ability to disappear at the right time.

And she would become afraid.

Because perhaps protection really does help you survive. But it also gradually teaches the skin to forget how to understand warmth.

She looked at them and thought: this, probably, is what a person looks like once they have finally managed to deal with themselves.

And for some reason, she did not want to win at that price.

She did not need grand words from him.

At least, not as often as she sometimes thought she did.

Not vows.

Not promises.

Not scenes after which people's lives change, cities collapse, marriages end, one-way tickets are bought, and everyone finally begins to speak the truth so loudly, as if all this time they simply had not known the right volume.

In truth, she wanted something much simpler.

For him to say: come.

Not like a hero.

Not like a man taking too much upon himself.

Just like a person who wants her nearby.

She wanted to come and not become an event.

Not a disruption of order. Not a circumstance that had to be fitted somewhere, explained, survived, and then carefully put back in its place.

She wanted to sit beside him and talk about some nonsense.

About food. About the people at the next table. About the fact that he had that strange expression on his face again, and she was speaking too fast again.

She wanted to be silent with him without meaning.

Not that heavy silence in which each person is checking who will break first, but the ordinary quiet of two people who do not need to keep proving that there is something between them.

She wanted them to be able to bury themselves in their phones and sometimes show each other something stupid. A meme. A message. A photograph. Someone else's ridiculous phrase.

She wanted that impossible luxury — to be near him without tension.

Without every meeting becoming a test, every glance a piece of evidence, every pause a reason to invent yet another version of what was happening.

She did not even want a great love.

She wanted ordinary access to the person she loved.

The possibility of saying something unimportant.

Of staying another hour.

Of not hurrying to gather herself back together.

Of not feeling that every movement toward him had to be justified by pain, drama, or the exceptional nature of the moment.

And perhaps that was exactly what was impossible.

Not passion.

Not confession.

Not desire.

But the simple human thing: come. Sit beside me. Tell me some nonsense. Be here while the world, for a few minutes, asks nothing special of us.

In this world, as it turned out, the hardest thing is to give the simplest thing.

She felt grown-up when she started drinking Americano and stopped writing to him.

How vulgar, of course.

Almost Paulo Coelho, only without the desert and with a decent coffee shop.

But what can you do, if sometimes growing up really does not look like a grand decision, but like a small domestic betrayal of yourself.

Before, she had loved coffee with milk. Something soft, warm, almost comforting. Something that would not taste too bitter. Something whose taste could be smoothed out, sweetened, made kinder than it actually was.

With him, she had done more or less the same thing.

Diluted.

Explained.

Filled in the gaps.

Added meaning where there was not enough of it. Cream into bitterness. Beauty into a pause. Tenderness into absence.

Then one day, she ordered an Americano and did not write to him.

Not dramatically.

Not with a proud inner monologue.

Not so that he would feel the loss from afar and suddenly understand everything men usually understand only in badly written films.

She simply did not write.

She looked at her phone, saw that little door through which she had entered the same place so many times, and for some reason did not open it.

The Americano was bitter.

Nothing special.

Just coffee without any attempt to make it gentler.

And there was something almost offensive in that adulthood: not saving the taste from itself. Not saving a person from his absence. Not saving love from the way it was actually made.

She sat there, drinking her absurdly symbolic coffee, thinking that if someone wrote this in a book, she would roll her eyes.

A woman drinks black coffee and finally chooses herself.

God, what a cheap scene.

But sometimes life, unfortunately, has no taste at all.

Sometimes it simply places before you a plastic lid, a bitter cup, an unread message in your head — and gives you, for the first time in a very long while, the chance to do nothing.

If her love had circles of hell, the first one would be called "he didn't reply."

The simplest one, almost domestic. Nothing special. Just a phone lying nearby, a silent screen, and inside her, a small private underworld already beginning to open.

The second circle would be "he replied wrong."

This, of course, is its own kind of human madness: to wait for a message and still fall somewhere lower, because the intonation is wrong, the rhythm is wrong, the measure of involvement is not the one she had managed to invent while he was silent.

The third circle would be called "I understand everything."

A very dangerous place. It is usually inhabited by women who have almost explained everything to themselves and are therefore ready to suffer a little longer. There is always a great deal of nobility there, bad sleep, and inner work no one asked them to do.

The fourth circle is "I won't write."

There she became especially grown-up, drank her Americano, opened the chat, closed the chat, opened it again, and behaved almost with dignity. For eight minutes. Sometimes twelve.

The fifth circle was the most unpleasant one.

It was called "I made it all up myself."

There was no one left to blame there. Not him, not the circumstances, not the distance, not other people's obligations, not the wrong timing. There she sat opposite her own imagination and understood that it had been working again without weekends, bonuses, or approval from reality.

The sixth circle is "he is still dear to me."

This is where the real torture began.

Because she could be angry. She could devalue it. She could call the whole thing stupidity, weakness, hormones, literature, women's fiction, anything at all. But afterwards, there would still remain inside her that quiet, stubborn knowledge: dear.

Not ideal. Not safe. Not always gentle. Not the way she had managed to write him in her letters.

But dear.

And perhaps that was the worst part: when all the arguments were already on her side, and the feeling still refused to vote correctly.

The seventh circle was called "hope."

She, of course, would have placed it very low.

Because pain, anger, shame, jealousy — all of those, at least, are honest. They have a shape, a temperature, a cause. Hope always arrives well-dressed. Speaks quietly. Sits down beside you. Pretends it is only staying for a minute.

And moves in.

The eighth circle was called "almost over it."

It was especially disgusting there, because everything already looked decent. She worked, laughed, replied to people, bought coffee, made plans, and almost believed she had made it out.

And then one word, one city, one song, one similar gesture — and everything was back in its place.

Which is to say, inside her.

The ninth circle was called "I still love him."

There was no beautiful drama there anymore, no anger, no desire to prove anything to anyone. Only a quiet, almost boring fact, which made everything worse precisely because it no longer needed explanations.

She still loved him.

And perhaps this was the lowest place of her hell: not where it hurt the most, but where it was no longer possible to pretend that the pain had meaning.