I want to express my eternal gratitude to you once again (in addition to all the Facebook messages I’ve sent on your birthdays over the 20+ years of knowing you) because I never get tired of doing it. Thank you for becoming a role model of a teacher and a person for me, for believing in me, and for encouraging me to express myself since our very first lesson together. This gratitude extends to a more recent moment as well when I shared with you my intention to write a collection of memoir-like essays, similar to those you assigned us in high school, and you were genuinely curious to read it. Well, here it is. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I first saw you at the desk that I was going to share with you for the next two amazing years at our incredible high school. On that September day, I was excited and scared about all the unknown things that were yet to come but I tried to keep my cool as much as I could. The only familiar face at that point was our teacher’s, but very soon, sitting next to you, I felt that you were friendly, as if you were eager to get to know me. I think we became friends as soon as we started talking. How could we not because as you later told me, you recognized me the moment I entered the classroom because you had seen me in a dream before. So, when I took a seat next to you, you knew right away that we would become very good friends.

You became my rock in this new place, and in a matter of just a few days we were inseparable like Siamese twins. Although you excelled in most subjects, especially English (oh, I was in awe of how fluently you spoke and how seemingly effortless it all was for you), I turned to you mostly for emotional support and inspiration, rather than help with homework. I still can’t quite comprehend how we managed to talk for hours and hours on end, both in person – in class and during breaks – and on the phone almost every night. My parents must have been really unhappy about the growing phone bills, but I couldn’t help myself because I had found someone who got me so well that, despite not sharing all of my interests, tolerated me with my unwavering love for The X Files, romantic novels, foreign pop singers, and boy bands. However, we did share a love for learning and a unique sense of humor, and most importantly, we just enjoyed each other’s company. We also knew all too well what it meant when no one really cared about our birthdays; being born almost a year apart, both in late December, we had witnessed our friends focusing more on the upcoming New Year’s than celebrating our birthdays. So, in our final year of school, we joined forces and had an unforgettable birthday party with a bunch of our friends just two days before the biggest Russian holiday. It was fun for both of us to be celebrated that way.

During those two years in high school, we went through thick and thin together: there was a lot of studying, laughing and crying, eating desserts at our favorite café, sharing stories of sleepless school nights spent writing essays in Russian or English or attempting to memorize math, chemical or physics formulas that seemed incomprehensible to us, exchanging thoughts on movies, sharing our own romantic stories and dreams. And countless jokes told and laughed at uncontrollably.

Sometime during the winter of our second and final year of high school, you pulled off such an incredible psychological prank on me that I still mentally applaud you for it today. I don’t think it was intentional, though, you just went along and played off my reactions. Here’s how it happened.