OXXXYMIRON|| MIRON|| MIRON FEDOROV

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It had been raining for six days. Not a downpour—a fine, gray drizzle that blurred the world outside. She sat on the windowsill, her forehead pressed against the cold glass, watching the raindrops chase each other.

The phone was lying face down next to her. Yesterday, she spent three hours reading comments under news articles. Then she deleted the app. Then she downloaded it again. Then she simply turned off the sound.

There had been no messages from Miron for two days now. The last one had come from Heathrow—a short one: "I'm here. Don't be bored." She imagined him writing this, standing at the baggage claim, in his signature black sweatshirt, hunched over, shielding his eyes from casual glances. Back in London, no one looked back at him. He just walked along. No one pointed, no one whispered behind his back that very word that was now firmly attached to his name.

She slid down from the windowsill, threw on his old hoodie—it had been hanging on the back of a chair since he left, she hadn’t put it away—and went to put the kettle on.

The apartment was quiet. Too quiet for someone accustomed to the constant blaring of music from the speakers at four in the morning, and to the inevitable sizzling and burning of something in the kitchen, because Miron was always distracted by his rhyme, forgetting about the frying pan. She still, when she woke at night, listened for the creak of a floorboard in the hallway, for the click of a lock.

The kettle boiled and turned off. She poured instant coffee into a mug—two spoonfuls, just the way he liked it—and only then remembered she was drinking tea.

She watched the black powder absorb the water and thought about how the news said "left the territory of the Russian Federation," but what it really meant was that he was no longer on the pillow next to her. No bare feet on the cold floor. No voice.

The phone vibrated. She jerked faster than she could stop herself from doing.

Miron sent a photo. A typical shot from the window of his rented apartment: a gray London sky, just as low and wet as here, a fire escape on the building next door, someone's T-shirt drying on the railing. And a short caption:

"The view is so-so. We had a better view from our window."

We have. Not "I have." We have.

She bit her lip and zoomed in on the photo, peering into the reflection in the glass—a vague silhouette, a raised hand holding a phone, a familiar tilt of the head. He stood there, thousands of kilometers away, photographing someone else's rain and remembering that "we" still meant the two of them.

"We're just having rain," she typed.

The three dots blinked for almost a minute. She waited, holding her breath.

"I've been thinking," it finally came. And immediately after, without a pause: "When all this crap blows over, come over. Or I'll fly over. We'll figure it out somehow. You know, I haven't even read these laws."

She snorted—half laugh, half sob. That was Miron for you: he'd just been blacklisted on every conceivable platform, his way home blocked, and he was saying, "We'll figure it out somehow"—and, most importantly, in a tone as if he were asking where to get salt when he'd run out at three in the morning.

THC: STOPPED CRAP
LINK TO THC: https://t.me/ykurenayashval