Lena and I were in the same class once.
Then our lives drifted quite far apart. She worked in information security and built her own projects. One of them was called NaDom — a bot for ordering IV drips at home, with a web app and all the architecture it would have been easier not to build at all. But she built it.
Now she lives in Arkhangelskoye.
I arrived in the morning with my laptop.
Her father has a workshop: he makes furniture fittings. I used to run a laser cutter, so it turned out fairly quickly that we had things to talk about. Metal, machines, production, ways to make some simple physical object better.
It’s funny how easily people find each other around objects.
With her mother the conversation went a completely different way. Berries, politics, microdosing, people. A bit of the Bible.
We talked about people quite a lot.
More and more I think that looking at someone clearly doesn’t mean looking at them badly.
You can understand why a person acts a certain way and still call things by their names. You can love someone and see their weakness. You can forgive and not rewrite the past. For some reason we keep trying to pick one or the other: either condemn or excuse.
The Bible seems to me to work differently.
In it, people almost never come across as particularly convincing. They are afraid, they betray, they envy, they bargain, they run, they come back. There is remarkably little need in it to prove that a person is good.
And the person stays valuable anyway.
After the house we went for a walk.
We sat with wine by the village hall.
We tried to go into the church, but a service was on. So we didn’t go in.
The rain that day was short. It would start quickly, go for a few minutes, then stop as if nothing had happened. After a while it would start again.
We were both in black, walking around Arkhangelskoye in that rain.
I liked the old kindergarten.
I didn’t like the new houses at all.
They look like houses you could put down anywhere. The old ones here stand against the slopes, the trees, the roads and the low sky as if they had grown up together with them.
Old buildings are probably often more beautiful not because people used to build better.
They have simply had time to come to terms with the land.
We walked on. Sometimes we talked about work, sometimes about people, sometimes about nothing in particular.
At some point I thought about how strangely time is arranged.
Once we just sat in the same classroom.
Then came information security, my jobs, her projects, cities, completely separate lives.
And years later we are sitting with wine by a village hall, not going into a church because of a service, and walking on down a wet road.
Towards evening it got colder.
Lena gave me her black HUGO zip hoodie so I wouldn’t freeze on the way. Her mother gave me berries to take along. It turned out later she had also meant to pack an apple pie.
I took the bus back.
If you list the events of the day, it comes to almost nothing.
The workshop.
Fittings.
Berries.
Politics.
Microdosing.
The Bible.
Wine by the village hall.
A church we didn’t enter.
An old kindergarten.
Slopes.
A few short showers.
Someone else’s black jacket.
But maybe memory is simply built badly for big events.
The big things we photograph on purpose, name, mark with a date.
The real ones often pass without a name.
You just end up in some place, among a few people, and for a few hours life doesn’t ask to be explained.
Arkhangelskoye.