Евгений Мешков - Simple Truths of Life

Becoming to pay more attention to what was happening in real life, I immediately noticed the presence of something that I had not noticed before due to the almost constant stay in my head – it was a pretty loud noise from the air conditioners of a branch of one of the Russian banks which in those years was right under our apartment. Mom had already written complaints about them because of the loud noise, and once the bank really rearranged its air conditioners in order to lower them, but their annoying noise still continued to go to the apartment.

The first of February 2007 I went to work for the first time. My first day at work was training. I just walked with another young employee to various offices in Moscow. As I understand it, without a foot courier, the bosses often ordered him to deliver parcels and correspondence. Everything seemed normal. But when I came to the office the next day, the first thing I heard when I opened the door was: “What do you think of our courier?” – coming from that guy’s lips while he was leaving the front door. One of the young female employees quickly appreciated me and said that I was a very normal guy, albeit a little balding. Most likely, she changed her mind after a couple of weeks later when I looked at her awkwardly, still being shy, about which she immediately told the secretaries.

I have no purpose to shame someone in this book, but for subsequent events in my life, it will be important to mention that it soon became clear that some employees of the small company had sex with each other, but two still formed normal a couple. Then one new girl calmly told the secretary that she slept with the guy with whom I was during my training day.

I never liked the theme of one-night-stands, or when people who barely knew each other had sexual intercourse. There was a case in, if I remember correctly, the eleventh grade, when a guy who deprived of virginity the same girl who asked me if I wanted to be her boyfriend, boasted to two of my friends that he had sex with a “drop dead brunette” to whom he came to help with a computer, and then he asked them how things were in their “personal life”. Personal… It is funny and sad at the same time that that guy subsequently called the previously mentioned girl with a word starting with the letter “W”, since she slept with many guys during two years of study, and he did not want to be with her because of this… Of course, there is a chance that I was hurt that someone really has sex, because I envied them deep inside. But I think that an innate sense of morality also played a role in my sorrows.

Once I decided to end the habit of masturbating because I no longer needed it – after all, I initially started masturbating due to the inability to speak normally and get acquainted with girls, but now I did not have that problem with speech, and I thought about finding a girlfriend. Then I constantly thought about sex, which led me to porn sites and masturbation. It happened every day. Having a job, I was busy most of the time. Surprisingly, I managed to live five days without masturbation, and I felt good. But everything changed when I was in the metro. I just got into the subway car on Preobrazhenskaya Ploshchad and felt that I started experiencing coronary symptoms. I had to get out of the car on Sokolniki to catch my breath and calm down. The terrifying symptoms did not go away, but I again got into another subway car and went to work. Returning to the office after a couple of hours, I still had a bad sensation in my heart. Then I for the first time poured myself cold water from a cooler in the office. Perhaps the water helped me a little. In the evening, when I was already at home, my health was good… So good that I could not feel my heart, the beating of which had already become so familiar for the long months that I continued to masturbate despite the fact that every new orgasm again forced my heart to beat harder than usual. Now, having at the disposal the knowledge that I have, it looks stupid, but that evening I decided to start masturbating in order to feel my heart again, because I believed that it could stop at all, and I would die if I continued refrain from masturbation…

Regarding death, I remember how during my work I walked to the subway, thinking about my life and my problems. Having stepped inside, I had a clear realization that if there is nothing after death, then there is no reason not to try to live this life, regardless of what you have to experience in it. After all, something is better than nothing.

In the courier office itself, one of the directors began giving me tasks to take out their garbage in the trash on the street. At first, I did not think anything about it, but as new such requests continued to be given to me, I began to think about how this becomes a kind of job that I do not have to do. It was not even my garbage, since I hardly spent time in the office and did not use office supplies. Soon, I decided to defend my rights and told the director about my unwillingness to take out the garbage. He understood everything, but I was a little embarrassed when they made another courier take out the garbage.

Working as a courier, I was able to visit different parts of Moscow. The salary was small, only 9000 rubles, but I had time to think about what I want in life, and at the same time I was doing something. I thought about going to University, but I did not know which one. I darted between computer science and economics, which I once told the CEO when he drove me to a street near the office after I did a personal job for him. He told me then that he would give me the job of assistant for their economist or programmer – depending on my choice. It was a great chance for a future career…

Once I had no tasks, and I sat on the couch, which stood near the secretaries. I was reading a self-teacher book then to teach myself English, which I decided to learn right after I learned about the real nature of stuttering. There was still an hour until the end of the working day, and I remember exactly how the red-haired secretary Natasha looked at the second hand of the clock hanging above the front door, as if trying to rush it. Our office had very few windows and natural light. Basically, all sections of the office were lit only with lamps, and system administrators even huddled in a tiny room with no windows, the door of which was constantly closed from the eyes of other employees. At that moment with the clock, I realized that I did not want to spend my whole life inside of four walls, I wanted something else, something bigger and more interesting. But I did not know what exactly I wanted…

I quit on May 7, having worked as a courier for several months.

If I remember correctly, it was in May that I wanted to try myself in the modeling business, still having the memories that I used to be considered a handsome guy. I think I wanted to find confirmation that I still was.

I sent my photos to several agencies. I received only one answer, and it just invited me to be an extra in some show called “Sex with Anfisa Chekhova.” It was said in the message that the meeting would be in the VDNH metro, if I remember correctly. I decided to go there.

Coming out of the subway car, I saw a large crowd of young people about my age at the meeting place. Some of them had fun talking with each other. I remember that there were girls. I started having very intense anxiety at the thought of starting to speak with stuttering among the crowd, and in the end I just walked past those people and went outside to walk a bit and then go back home.

I must say that while stuttering was over, my habit of dreaming and thinking about something did not go away completely. Because of this, from time to time I had stupor in my speech or even returned to the old methods of being silent and inactive, as in my previous episode at VDNKh. At that time, I no longer had friends with whom I could learn to speak. Therefore, having a lot of free time, I decided to travel to Moscow shopping centers to talk with different merchants on different topics – depending on what they were selling.

At first, my old fears reminded me of themselves, and I did not immediately dare to open my mouth. But with each new seller that I approached, I became more self-confident and soon became an ordinary person with normal speech. At the same time, I learned about the fact that some sellers will get out of their way trying to sell goods. It is good that I did not take with me money then and I did not have a credit card, because who knows, maybe I would have bought that camera with a huge touch screen…

I also realized during my aspirations to be focused on reality that it is impossible to be stuttering if you are here and now, since your body is under your complete control.

From time to time, I often recalled my decision to begin to fantasize purposefully at the age of 14, and I was depressed by the thought that I had lost as many as 4 years in my imagination. But then I told myself that with an average life of 60 years, I still have about 42 years to enjoy life – in fact, I lived less than one third of my life, just having entered adulthood, and the whole life was still was ahead of me. My experience has given me a chance to learn something unique about human mind.

I also had no desire to play video games anymore. And I regretted spending a lot of time on UFO related websites too for a while… but then my feelings cooled down and I remembered that I had a good reason for doing that – my experience with the bright entity in the village prompted me to start looking for answers to my questions about the unknown side of life and its meaning.

It is a pity that these joyful attempts at self-inspiration were met with a bitter understanding that I would also have to live all these long years with an asymmetry on my lip and with hair falling out.

Then the summer came, and I went to the village. I naively believed that I could regain my old relations with my village friends, but upon arrival it became clear that time was gone. Over the past years, that I was lost in my imagination, I moved away from my friends too much and could not reduce the gap that had formed.

One day it rained, and I was sitting by the window in the Little House, learning English. It suddenly dawned on me that now that stuttering was no longer a barrier in my life, I could achieve many things that I could only dream of before. Then I started to have a burning desire to leave Russian and live in the USA, since from early childhood I was partial to that country, which so often shined on me from the TV screen. I always liked their way of life and values, and I thought back then that the United States was almost a paradise on Earth.

I quickly left for Moscow and started searching on the Internet about the possibilities of emigration. It quickly became clear that it is not that simple, especially for a person without a higher education. But I did not allow this bad news to stop me – I no longer wanted to hide from problems and give up halfway.

I was also bothered by the fact that after three years they could again call me to check the speech at the military registration and enlistment office, and I wanted to leave the country by then.

The main reason for the move, I think, was that I wanted to start my life over with a clean slate in the USA, I wanted to forget about everything bad that reminded me of the past. I did not want to see either my father or my mother – my father because of stuttering, and my mother because of quarrels at school. I wanted to burn all the bridges.

Another important reason for my strong desire to leave Russia was the cold northern climate. Many months of the sky being covered with gray thick clouds often led me into the blues. I wanted to live in a warm climate and see palm trees, sun, and sky all year round. For this reason, I also considered Australia as a possible destination for immigration.