You only want black coffee in the morning. Black as your hair. You tell me: ‘I try to avoid all that war news, and you listen to it first thing in the morning.’

The Russians are closing in on some key village. It has ‘sol’ in the name, so perhaps it used to have a salt mine.

I switch to a channel with Russian songs. You start dancing in the black night gown I bought for you at a place called Kik. It reaches only about 10 cm below your round buttocks. Yesterday you showed me pictures of you jumping into the Black Sea in winter with a big smile.

Most of your possessions are in an apartment far away in Berdiansk. You are unusually happy with the few things I got you. A night gown, slippers, soap, a brush, an ash tray. You smoke incessantly and yet you have no wrinkles around your eyes whatsoever. Not even at 34.

In about half an hour you have to get back to your son and I have to get back to my son. Your son is called Timur and mine is called Bruno. Only four years separate them.

Timur’s father died in Russia. On the day he got paid. Officially of a heart attack. You were 8 months pregnant then.

I always assume his shadow is hanging over us. You don’t talk about it much, but I have seen pictures of the two of you dancing and drinking. There is carefree vibe to those pictures I cannot give you. Though am filled with joy when am around you, I soak up all the grief in the world and am never without sadness. You are the one who fled a war zone, you are on the one who saw refugees trudge through streets where all the cars had lost their windows because of explosions, but I am the sad one, the bitter one, the pondering one.

There is a kind of indestructible joie de vivre to you I don’t fully understand. And it makes me wonder at which point I lost mine.

As an adulterer I am plagued by guilt over not being with my son right now. There is this small idealistic part of me that imagines a traditional harmonious happy family, but my hormones have always overruled that vision.

My grandfather was a notorious philanderer. My father likely suppressed that side of him, cause he had been the victim of his father’s appetites, but the poison runs in me.

A guy I met at a club a few weeks ago, the most Bohemian person I have ever talked to, urged me not to call it poison. ‘Maybe you are just enjoying yourself. What’s wrong with that?’

You smoke another cigarette close to the open window. In the heart of winter. Then you take a shower. You get dressed. Put on your boots which look like army boots. Not exactly what am usually drawn to, but they suit you somehow. You have more fight in you than all soldiers in this world put together.

You lost both your parents early. You lost the father of your child before your child was even born You were raising a son in war zone with almost no help, used all your savings to migrate, built a new life, while managing to smile all through it.

You have a way of reducing my silly worries to the most practical conclusions.

When I bend over backwards to schedule as many clients as possible, you say: ‘Even if you could schedule twice the number you are scheduling now, would it ever make you rich?’

No.

‘Why do you worry so much about money? Is Bruno lacking something?’

No.

Maybe I needed to feel the real war in you, so I can take my own life a lot more lightly.

The hungry melancholic and the joyful survivor.

We make odd bed partners.

I wish you’d thank me for the orgasms I gave you. The most beautiful words I hear  from you are ‘xarasho, xarasho’, when am inside you, but no, the only thing you thank me for is that I gave you back the joy of reading by lending you some Russian novels.

I added some curiosity to your robust joy.

You added some perspective to my robust sadness.