At the same time, I trained my memory, trying to repeat the whole sentence that I just read. At first it was not easy, but over time I began to see the result and soon I could remember all the words in the sentence.

When the next time came to pay for English classes, I realized that with my own education program I greatly overtook the curriculum, and it could no longer teach me anything new. I stopped attending English courses.

Working days went well. I liked to walk around Moscow, from time to time going to the shops in order to place cans of the company on the store’s shelves. All in all, I was very happy then. It is only a pity that I had to spend about forty minutes to get to the northern part of the gray metro line, but I never dared to ask the supervisor if it was possible to give me a closer district.

I also began to notice how time seemed to slow down when I was focused on reality, walking around an unfamiliar area during my walks from one store to another.

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.