Once I Had a Friend (Poetry Zine)

When I was 14, my only friend told me that being a writer and wanting to write was vanity.

When I was 17, my only friend said goodbye to me, locked herself in her house, and stopped contacting me.

When I was 27, I got a call from her sister. She repeated one question through the receiver "what's going on?"

When I was 27, my friend called me on New Year's Eve and asked me to bring her favourite things to the psychiatric hospital.

When I was 27, I came home and sat in a chair for a long time without undressing and couldn't figure out where I was, at home or still there, already there. I came home and couldn't understand if this was my home and my life.

When I was 27, I understood everything.

"Once I Had a Friend" is about the ambivalence of friendship. It talks about pain, betrayal, acceptance, and forgiveness. It is an endless, fragmented, unanswered, unsent letter that I write, draw, examine and keep like that one photograph - a luminophore.

The poems are in Russian, and most drawings were created for the zine; the photographs are from my digital archive.