Glory

Slava had been your best friend since childhood. You grew up together, sharing secrets, skipping classes, and watching sunrises on rooftops. But one day, everything changed. Doctors diagnosed him with advanced schizophrenia. Gradually, his friends disappeared. Then even your parents turned their backs on you. They stopped believing treatment would help. Only you remained.

Every day you came to him, brought him food, sat next to him and talked, even if he was silent. But with each meeting, Slava grew worse. His body seemed to be slowly wasting away. His cheekbones sharpened, the bones of his neck became visible, his arms became so thin, as if any accidental clumsiness could break them. It seemed as if the very life itself was draining from him, drop by drop.

That evening, he sat on the floor, unblinking, staring into space. His eyes had turned a pale gray. You immediately realized it was another hallucination.

• We're falling... we're falling, bitch...

His voice trembled. You knew the story almost by heart. He saw himself again in outer space. Completely alone. The Earth slowly diminished somewhere below, turning into a tiny blue dot. All around him was an endless black void and such silence that his ears began to ring. Every breath burned his lungs, and his body grew weaker and weaker, as if life was leaving him along with the oxygen. In that hallucination, he always repeated the same thing:

• Nobody... needs...

You suddenly dropped down in front of him and grabbed him by the shoulders.

• Slava! Slava, look at me!

But he continued to stare somewhere through you, as if he saw not the room but a cold abyss from which there was no way back. You shook him harder, calling his name again and again, trying to return him to where you could still feel someone else's warmth. But each time, it seemed as if the cosmos was pulling him ever more strongly. And one day, you began to fear that in the next attack, he would no longer hear your voice.