3

Regardless of the fact that I had an intact family, mom and dad, I was neither happy nor fulfilled. I didn’t really love my dads for I thought them narrow-minded and unintelligent. My conclusion was based on comparing them to my friends’ parents - I had often visited their places and hanged out with their families - and the comparison wasn’t kind to mine. Irina’s mom was twelve years younger than mine; Anastasia’s dad was a major diamond expert and a good provider while mine was a miserable couch potato not even willing to lift his a*s and make a dollar. Maria’s parents were intellectual philosophers discussing such topics as the origin of the Universe, while my old lowbrows had only two subjects of conversation: “What we gonna eat tomorrow” and “When we gonna do renovation”. I was totally disrespectful to my dads - and I wasn’t hiding that.

Me falling in love as all teenage girls do exacerbated the situation. My crush was not an actor or a singer, but just a regular country guy. He was a neighbor of my relatives I was staying with for summer vacation. He bore the most ordinary name, too - Alexander, or Shurik as they called him. Still, that Shurik looked cute as hell and all the girls in the neighborhood including my cousin Tanya were crazy about him, and the chances of something to develop between him and myself were close to zero. To me he was even less available than young Dolph Lundgren Shurik looked like a twin brother of.

But I was hoping, to no avail. Shurik didn’t even know I was alive - I was no more than an empty spot to him. His indifference was riling me up; I bent over backwards to get his attention every way I could: I would sling chokeberries at his back, hide his shoes when he was visiting my cousin’s elder brother. Sure those childish attempts hadn’t worked out, on the contrary, they’d put Shurik off me for good. Not only was he ignoring me now, but avoiding me quite openly.

That wouldn’t stop me, though. As is well known it’s easier to stop a wild horse than a hopeless teenager in love. I continued my attempts to win his heart by all available means. Our four-year age difference felt like an irredeemable abyss to me; I believed that not my stupid behavior but the age difference was the obstacle. And I wouldn’t give up the hope that two or three years later, when I was fifteen and he was nineteen the age gap between us would no longer matter.

And then, while I was so desperately hoping and suffering over my unrequited love, my silly dads cut in.

They popped up at the worst possible time. It was a May holiday, the weather was still freezing out there and the four of us were sitting on the bench wearing jackets - Tanya, her elder brother, Shurik and I. Shurik was tuning a guitar - the one that had been collecting dust in our loungeroom for years. Mom had last played on it before she married my dad, I suppose. She’d used to compose songs and lyrics and pick up chords. They sounded pretty nice, although somewhat primitive. Perhaps, those songs had helped her get my dad snowed. Despite her total illiteracy in the Russian language she had passion for words; she would make up poetry describing feelings she had never really experienced. She had never truly loved my father and married him just for convenience; but the love she hadn’t felt for him had to be imitated - and so she’d imitated it with her author’s songs about spring and cherry blossoms, pure white snow and other such things. Like a lace-making machine, doing its work automatically, produces fabric of immense beauty, my mother would make the lacework of her author’s songs not putting one bit of her soul into what my naïve dad had fallen for so gullibly. I inherited from her the poetic sensibility and schizophrenic perception of the world. From my father I got his laziness, gullibility and inner softness which ruined me afterwards. But that’s not the point right now.

So, Shurik was tuning the guitar I had stolen from my mother for Tanya. Tanya had said she wanted to learn playing the guitar and singing to it, but her parents wouldn’t buy it for her. While I had a quite useless guitar collecting dust on the wall, for even I didn't show any interest to it. So why not do some good? The more so, I had the twin advantages of getting rid of an unnecessary thing and making my cousin happy. When you make someone happy, you make it double for yourself. As the saying goes, giving is better than receiving.

I sat next to Shurik and was on cloud nine conscious of my own generosity. Even as Shurik casually remarked that the strings and tuning pegs were not that good and, in truth, they should have been replaced - it couldn’t lower my high spirits.

Having done with the tuning, Shurik started strumming some chords - unbelievably sweet and so painfully familiar (later on I found out that the sweetest, heavenly music he’d been playing then was taken from Musicola’s song - I Will Never Forget You).

And just like that, at the sweetest moment, so rare in my poor eventless teenagerhood, my old buffoons came and put a damper on it.

Reviews

[emmajoygreen]

You tried, you gave, you showed willing re' the guitar.. please let me read that from then onwards your self-esteem grows and blossoms.

However Shurik, being a liar over that music, was and is, best forgotten.. Your additional touches make the characters less bland yet yet alarming.