Евгений Мешков - Simple Truths of Life

Because of this inability to confess my feelings to a girl, I for the first time seriously thought about suicide. “Seriously” means that I really decided that when I would be in Moscow, I would commit suicide by jumping from a tall building. It was not just a thought or fantasy; it was a firm decision. Something interesting happened after that. A few months ago, I watched a television show about palmistry, and how lines, or dots, crossing the life line, can mean a person’s death. Then in the village, sitting by the window of the Small House, I accidentally noticed that a spot appeared on the life line of my right palm, located not far from half the length of that line. At that moment, I clearly realized that I would really commit suicide and die if I would not change the course of my thoughts. I chose life, and the spot on my life line quickly disappeared.

Then I continued to fantasize very often, too often… If earlier it was a conscious action, a choice that I made during loneliness, then it was happening more and more as if by itself. I constantly dreamed of something, or someone, even while doing some work, for example, while repairing a motorcycle, or when I was repairing the roof of our house and terrace. Fictional stories covered up all the “bad” of my real life so perfectly that I simply could not live without them, because I no longer felt discomfort and fear. Needless to say, I fantasized about the girl I fell in love with and often accompanied those fantasies with masturbation… (I should add a clarification here so that everyone has a clear picture of what I mean when I talk about my negative habit of daydreaming in this particular book. During such fantasies, I began to “voice” the speech of imaginary characters in my head, “hearing” a muffled “voice” that I myself generate in my mind).

Once we had dinner in the kitchen of the Big House. We were eating there because my father had come for a visit. I think he drank alcohol then, and I made a speech about the harm from such alcohol consumption, and that psychology plays an important role in this addiction. It was a very clever speech for a teenager of my age, and my father jokingly mentioned this, noting that I did not take after him. I never studied psychology. I just as if “always”, or from birth, knew that truth, which I then told my father.

This was not the only time I had knowledge of something that I had never read or heard about in my life. Once in Moscow, while still at school, I watched a television program about the secrets of death, and at the end of that program, the announcer said along a black screen, that after death we simply cease to exist. I immediately knew that this simply could not be true. If this were true, then it would mean that we are simple robots, and robots cannot identify themselves – they cannot say “I am” because they really think so, and not because in the past they were programmed by someone to say that. In the following years, when I was dealing with programming, I found even more confirmation of the correctness of that knowledge, but it is still difficult for me to express that truth with words so that everyone understands what I mean. And considering the fact that many modern serious scientists really believe that robots can gain consciousness, means that not all readers will understand me.

There was also a case in the village when I instructed an older friend against drinking with another, more “adult” company, as it was clear that he was going to make a mistake in his desires to be with people of his age at the expense of his health and moral convictions – he had previously made a promise that would never drink. In the end, my fears were confirmed when he often drank and once, one might say, allowed one guy from another company to trample the mint that he planted earlier near his house – then we often went in the woods to transplant trees from there to the lawns in front of our houses – we were interested in it in our childhood.

Returning to the passage of my life on which we stopped, the time had come for the last eleventh grade.

After a couple of months, I, and several of my friends and acquaintances, started to have the Internet access.

One of the first things I started looking up was “how to cure stuttering”. On one of the forums I read the comment of an adult woman who, if my memory serves me, worked as a teacher and continued to stutter. She wrote that the best thing to do in this situation is to simply come to terms with stuttering. I got defensive then about the idea of putting up with stuttering. I could not put up with such a stammering speech, and I clearly remember that I wanted to be either completely normal and healthy, or no one at all. Then I closed the page and did not search for anything more regarding stuttering, thinking that if the best thing people on the Internet could write about stuttering was to put up with it, it meant that I would not find the answer to my question, otherwise all people would already known about the solution to the stuttering problem, right…?

Sometimes I looked at the pages that told about Russian saints who lived in Russia in the old days. I remember that one was a hermit who built his wooden house in the forest. Then I found that idea about hermitism interesting. I also remember the story of a man who resurrected a child that drowned in a well. Some of those websites talked about Auras.

Then I started looking for articles about UFOs and other little-known things. The reason for this was that distant event with the bright entity, which I, then a five-year-old child, saw at our house in the village. I think I, like Fox Mulder, tried to find the answers to my questions – do extraterrestrials exist? By that time, I already knew about the existence of ghosts and the so called “paranormal” things. And since those things really exist, why extraterrestrials cannot exist, whom many people talk to have had a contact with, which is also often met with skepticism, mistrust, and ridicule from society.

I was generally interested in space. I often read about planets and stars. I remember how I was mesmerized by photographs of Europa, the satellite of Jupiter, and other celestial bodies which are part of our solar system.

Strange, but sometime after, I read a book in which a photo of Moscow, taken from the air, was shown. The camera looked almost exactly down. Then for the first time I felt uneasy. My head seemed to be spinning. Then the same thing happened when I read articles about space, and on the pages photographs of planets, for example Jupiter, were shown. Sometimes I began to panic so much that it would become for me hard to breathe, and I would walk from the computer for a couple of minutes, trying to concentrate on reality, or think about something else. But I love space and the Universe, and therefore I would always come back to read the article, no matter how hard it was for me to do this in the presence of a huge planet on the page. Later I found out that I was not the only one who had “planet phobia”. I also began to be afraid of heights, and this despite the fact that I always liked to look from the window of my grandmother on the seventeenth floor of her house. And when my mother and I visited my aunt Zina, I also looked at the views of Moscow from the thirteenth floor without any problems. It was strange that this phobia came from nowhere and for no apparent reason…

I had developed other fears. For example, at one time I became afraid of the number thirteen. While doing exercises, I sometimes thought what if I had done a certain workout thirteen times? Because of this thought, I began to do that particular exercise again about ten times, so that there was no chance of getting to the number thirteen. I am glad to say that I quickly got rid myself from that ridiculous phobia.

There is one more thing that I went looking for on the Internet – more than candid photos of naked girls and women. I was interested to see what was hidden in the erotic films shown on television. Additionally, I wanted to see how sexual intercourse occurs. At heart I still hoped that I would have a girlfriend, and this knowledge would be useful to me. I think you already understood that I also began to masturbate very often, looking at porn photos.

Separately, it should be noted that there was a time when I questioned whether masturbation was harmful to health. But all that I found on the Internet was the articles of doctors who claimed that masturbation is not only not harmful, but also beneficial. With this information, I continued to lead my usual way of life – in the end, I liked the feelings that I experienced while masturbating, and I liked to look at beautiful female bodies, available “absolutely free” in a couple of mouse clicks.

As for school, I continued to skip it. The problems were not only with school. I stopped going to college for preparatory lectures, because during the first lecture, the teacher asked everyone to read aloud the text in turns, and I had great difficulties with that. The awkward looks and whispers of my young peers also could not in any way help me not stammer. In the eleventh grade my speech hesitations reached climax – I began to repeat one syllable and could not utter a single word, which once amused so much the girl who asked me to become her boyfriend a year ago. I do not know if she was ashamed for once wishing to be my girlfriend, or she was just the only one from the whole class who found it funny to hear my speech cramps and the twitching of my speech apparatus. What I can say is that for the first time I had to write the answer on a piece of paper in a room adjacent to the biology class. And it was the eleventh grade – the time when all other people actively fell in love and had fun spending their days with friends and loved ones with whom they calmly talked on various topics. As you probably know from what I wrote earlier, deep down I also wanted to experience all these joys of life.

I was not at all happy with who I was in my life. There was a moment in the ninth grade when, while walking with three classmates down the street after school, the new strong guy in our class started jokingly twisting my hand, as he usually did with all students, showing off his strength. My long-time classmate immediately exclaimed that the guy should stop doing this, as I stuttered. At that moment, I felt that I did not want people to think so of me as of a disabled person to whom they make concessions. My friend wanted to do what’s best, since he did not see what was happening in my inner world, but in fact my self-esteem and confidence shook once again at that hour.

Another similar incident also happened in the ninth grade. Then I had fun and laughed with other classmates in anticipation of the next lesson. Apparently, our teacher did not like our laughter, and of all the people she made a remark to me, saying that I too became noisy, like the others. The fact is that I would not mind being like others, and at times I considered myself the same as others. But, nevertheless, the fun came to an end… for a while.

Returning to the eleventh grade, perhaps this was the time when I overcame my fears and, using ICQ, managed to tell the village friend I was in love with about my feelings for her. To which she replied that she was very pleased, but she already had a boyfriend. He was my old friend from the village. If only I could have told her what I wanted, a couple of months ago, when she was still without a boyfriend…

I was disappointed. I also felt terrible because my fantasies about her were broken. This moment, along with several others, made me again start inventing fictional girls in my fantasies, so that I would not feel again the terrible pain in the depths of my soul that I felt when it turned out that the real girl I liked and was dreaming of had a boyfriend.