Anna

   I have a long story for you.
   I was twenty-two, working my first official job. Amid the tedium of civil service, one moment stood out. One of my colleagues, Anna Rakievna—a languid woman with Middle Eastern features and bedroom eyes—simply reached for something in the bottom drawer of her desk.
   Her pencil skirt completed a pattern in my mind.
And it turned obsessive.
   Suddenly the scent of Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue became irresistibly alluring; her office grew honey-sweet and magnetic, and matters that needed resolving there felt inexplicably urgent. Despite their novelty, I barely reflected on these sensations. They were merely a background hum at work, demanding nothing from me. Then I learned from colleagues that Anna Rakievna was preparing to get married.
   An abyss opened beneath my feet.
   Melancholy.
   Unease.
   I began to reflect. I began to think some action had been needed. Or maybe now. But on the other hand, everything already felt wrong. Everything that had been dormant surfaced as anxiety. First as flirtation. Then as more focused gestures of attention. And eventually her jokes—openly testing the nature of what was happening—with irony, almost defiance.
Sometimes she paused, almost in earnest:
   “What if we were actually together?”
   Only to turn it all back into laughter the moment she noticed me trying to take it seriously.
Her future husband, according to her remarks—whether serious, provocative, or sarcastic—was a privileged playboy with a taste for “not-quite-grown girls.”
   “Maybe that’s more your speed? Otherwise your mother will say you’ve found yourself an old hag,” she laughed, erasing any remaining trace of intrigue.
As the situation tilted toward satire, I wrote a playful story. I had been writing about everyone simply to amuse my colleagues, but this time it was about her and another character, told from his first-person perspective—a story of comic machismo trying to coexist with clumsy romanticism.
   She liked it.
   “This is unexpected. You’re nothing like yourself.”
She took the text with her.

   She called me at home over the weekend. Unexpectedly. - landlines still existed then. She was probably following something she’d seen in a film, while I was clearly out of the loop; I hadn’t gotten to Western videocassettes yet. It was about her, alone at home, her fianc; away, everything explicit. It’s obvious now what that was, but at the time it caught me completely off guard; every word felt like the last step through a minefield. I didn’t know what to do. It remained an episode one tries not to think about. A viscous uncertainty washed over me. I wrote a restless, unfixed piece for the piano and called it Anna.
   She went on vacation and returned married. Her birthday was approaching. We celebrated it in the office—it was customary to buy a cake—but lingered over the Saperavi I’d bought for the occasion, her choice. I let her listen to what I had written.
   We descended into the metro together. As we parted, she looked at me with a very tender, almost compassionate gaze. She said plainly that no one was home and that I should come over. I said it changed nothing, and no. Then she stepped closer and kissed me—almost one-sidedly—because I was unprepared and didn’t know what to do with it. As if she were trying to sense what was there, or give me the feeling of something missed, and say goodbye. Slowly, with that same gaze, she embraced me and boarded the train.
   The page had been written.
   By the next day, it was already turned.