Simple Truths of Life

One day our friends called us to travel around the neighboring areas. I loved to travel in nature and wanted to go with them. But did not do it. While friends left, we went to our favorite place where no one could see us. This was the beginning of the school holidays, and for many months we had not seen each other. He began to touch me in the southern latitudes, and if before I was excited in a second, at that moment I could not get an erection. It was an unspoken sign that my homosexual experience had come to an end.

My friend and I never talked about what we did in our childhood.

This experience had consequences in my life. I remember how another friend from Moscow and I were playing at his house when we were about ten years old – give or take. I remember exactly that while he was playing with a plastic Godzilla toy, there were thoughts in my head that I was not very interested, and I was more interested in girls and in sex with them, and not in toys. I myself had toys in my childhood, but I did not often play with them.

In my preschool years, I did not go to kindergarten and often spent time in the village with friends. I really enjoyed being there. Clean air, greenery, nature – everything gave me joy in my carefree childhood. For a long time, I was the youngest in our company. While my friends one by one started going to school, I continued to stay in the village with my mother for the warm autumn months, so that later my father would take us to Moscow for the winter.

In Moscow, I lived with my mother in a small one-room apartment. Although there was a time when we lived with my father in his two-room apartment. But then Mom found photographs in his closet where my father was with another woman. Her hair was dyed red and, as we learned later, her name was Marina…

My parents had a big argument, and my mother and I never visited my father for a long stay at his place again.

At the age of seven, I went to study at school No. 376, which is located next to my house on Khalturinskaya Street. I sat at the first desk in front of a young beautiful teacher who once suddenly told me to go down from the clouds, and then: “Wake up and sing!” – Did I dream in class that day? My desk mate was B.

In the first grade, everything was fine – or I thought so. The only thing I remember is how every time I cheerfully answered at the blackboard in front of the whole class, one guy sitting at his desk in the back rows always clearly stuck his head out to look at me. And I thought – why?

On the summer holidays of that year, I got my answer. About when I was six years old, my parents brought me to a doctor who studied and treated stuttering. I was prescribed some medications that I had to drink with water in slow sips. In my eyes at that time, it all did not seem negative. Visiting a doctor, taking medications – it was just another new experience in my childhood life. And in those summer holidays, I finally understood what stuttering had in store for me.

A and C were constantly teasing me because of my speech. They gave me a nickname, and for a long time I could not understand its connection with me. Did I look unusual? It did not seem to be so – many people called me beautiful in my childhood and youth. They did not answer my question – “What’s that got to do with me?”, and I received the answer only many years after…

Around the same early years of my life, I sometimes began to fantasize before going to bed. I clearly remember how I once fantasized about death. The fantasy took place in the village, and, I think, that fantasy arose because I subconsciously understood that my life was starting to go not the same way I would like it to go. Of course, I, like many others, did not want to be the object of ridicule, even though only a few people projected this negativity on me.

Meanwhile, the time has come for a second grade. Our class teacher had changed. The young woman left, and now we had a rather strict woman, who was much older.

If in the first grade I actively and vigorously spoke in class, in the second one I already completely understood that I am different from all the other people because of my stumbling speech. I was uncomfortable. If I were asked to draw the time spent before the second grade, then I would use bright light colors, for example yellow, but the second grade is the first year when these colors turned into gray faded shades. The desk at which I was sitting changed too. The bright place at the window was replaced by a more darker one behind the second desk near the wall.

I remember clearly the moment when our teacher asked me to read aloud the text in the book. I was already fully aware that I was reading with constant speech stutters. My tongue refused to obey me, and I could not do anything about it – no matter how hard I tried. All the time that I was reading, I held the sheet of the book with my finger so that it would not close, and when my torment came to an end, I removed my finger from the page to find in its place a pronounced wet spot from sweat.

Chapter 2. School Years and New Mysteries

I began to be afraid to speak. In school, every time a teacher was about to ask someone to answer a question, my heart would begin to pound quickly. The pulse immediately calmed down if someone else was asked.

In the following school years, I began to worry about whether I would have to answer or not on the way to school.

Chatting with friends was also difficult for me. I remember clearly the moments when a friend or acquaintance was mistaken in some question, and I knew the exact answer to the topic being discussed, an answer that could help another person, but I was so afraid that I would stumble on one word that I just could not allow myself to open my mouth. I just stayed silent.

One such moment happened in the village during the summer holidays. I walked then with friends in the evening. We walked a long circle around the village, and our conversation touched on unexplained phenomena. My experience with the bright yellow entity was ideal for our conversation… If only I could force myself to overcome the fear of speaking. The thought of all the negative that could have happened if I had started to stutter blocked all desire to share my unusual experience.

In school years I once thought about the fact that I was speaking absolutely normally in my imagination, to myself, and also when I was alone and was talking aloud to myself – it was simply impossible to stutter. It is a pity that at that time I did not give much importance to my remark – after all, the solution was so close!