We went to the same school.
Then school ended and our lives went separate ways. SHEKH left for Moscow to study.
That is where he was diagnosed with lymphoma.
I remember him coming back to Ulyanovsk during treatment. I remember the chemotherapy, the hair falling out, and how hard all of it looked.
Some things stay in your memory as a single frame, for no clear reason.
You don’t see someone for a long time, then he comes home, and suddenly it is obvious that something enormous happened in the gap between two meetings.
Many years passed.
Today SHEKH lives and works in Moscow.
He has been in remission for ten years.
And he follows Ulyanovsk’s Volga.
“Follows” here should be taken literally.
Moscow — Ufa.
Ufa — Ulyanovsk.
Moscow — Kazan.
Kazan — Naberezhnye Chelny.
Trains, buses, planes. New matchweek, new route.
He named his channel accordingly: «A Cancer Patient Chasing FNL Gold».
When the route brings him back to Ulyanovsk, we sometimes meet.
It usually looks completely ordinary.
“Coming over this weekend?”
“Next one, in U.”
Then we meet somewhere in the courtyard and talk.
Work. Money. Football. Websites. Moscow. Ulyanovsk. All the usual human nonsense.
That ordinariness is probably what gets me.
Stories about serious illness love turning a person into a symbol.
Here is a man who beat cancer — now he is obliged to understand life, change it, start valuing every second and do something big.
As if survival came with a new set of requirements attached.
But a person is allowed to just stay a person.
To love the same city.
The same club.
To board a train for a football match.
Years later I sometimes think of the SHEKH who came to Ulyanovsk during treatment.
And then I see another post:
Matchweek 5.
Moscow — Kazan.
Kazan — Naberezhnye Chelny.
Naberezhnye Chelny — Moscow.
And the distance between those two frames somehow says more about life than any of the correct words about it.
He used to come to Ulyanovsk as a man in treatment.
Now he comes for Volga.
And it seems to me that this is the whole story.