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The window is slightly open. The frosty air cuts his throat, but Ilya stands by the windowsill, clutching a long-extinguished cigarette. The room smells of perfume, last night's wine, and something hopeless. Polina sleeps, curled up on the sagging sofa, her eyelashes fluttering—she's dreaming of something he'll never know. He knows other things: every curl of the tattoo on her lower back, the mole behind her left ear, her habit of biting her lip when she's angry. But he doesn't remember what cigarettes she smokes. For some reason, this kills him more than all their arguments.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. One of those "melting ladies" whose numbers he'd promised to delete a hundred times. Ilya turned off the sound and looked at Polina. She was his vicious circle. His personal hell, somehow so warm. He remembered their first meeting. She was nineteen, he was twenty-one. She was in a tight dress, drunk, hysterical, ready to blame the whole world. And he simply walked up to her and said some nonsense. Since then, they couldn't live without each other, although with each passing day it became more and more obvious: they would never meet. Or meet in ten years, when he stopped being a "slacker" and she stopped believing she could save him.

"Don't go," he whispers into the void. She doesn't hear.

Ilya closed the window and sat down next to her. Placing his hand on her shoulder, he felt the evenness of her world. Tomorrow she would pack her things again. She would say it was the end. And at night, perhaps, he would again reach for something more than sleep, and the room would be filled with smoke. "You were just a creature," Ilya thought, "but loved. "

There's a strange dial tone on the line. He dials her number, even though she's sleeping three centimeters away. Just to hear the voice on the answering machine.

“Not today,” he says quietly. “Please.”

The moon outside the window doesn't flicker. It doesn't promise anything good at all. But when Polina suddenly opens her eyes and looks at him sleepily, angrily, endlessly—he understands: this is his unflickering light. His junk. His world, beating in his chest. She's not leaving. Not yet.