Snegurochka

By George Murphy

I can only write to you at night, Yana. You only feel real in these early-morning moments, when city lights glint outside, warm air whispers its way through the radiator, and I can cocoon myself in blankets in front of the computer, waiting for your messages to whistle their way out of the ether and into my life.

In class, in the library, at night when I’m lying sleepless in bed, I keep going back to the first moment, the moment we met. Yana. I was a little high, I think. I can’t remember. We were all in Amy’s room, with the blue string lights that she’d put up and the glowing star decals on the ceiling. I remember entering, being engulfed by the bluish darkness and the smell of vodka and flowery perfume, snow sliding blue past the windows. And I remember you lying on Amy’s bed, staring at the plastic galaxy on her ceiling. Did we talk much that night? I think we were introduced, but that must have been it. I wanted so badly to go up to you, to talk to you about something—but then Dave pulled me away to meet someone’s friend’s boyfriend and two shots and twenty minutes later you were gone. 

After that party, I kept trying to track you down. I asked around, but no one seemed to know you, as if your presence had hardly registered to them. Even Amy, who made a point of knowing everyone, had few insights. “She’s international—Russian maybe?” Amy told me over a dubious meal of dining hall seafood. “And she goes to Barnard, so she’s probably either gay or dating a rich European grad student.” I hadn’t yet considered the idea of you being with someone else, but once faced with it, I had to admit that it was entirely possible, even probable. I didn’t know you at all. 

I don’t know if you remember the second time we met. It was very cold that night, with sharp winds racing through the dark streets around campus—the arctic sort of wind that steals under your clothes, under your skin. And I was at another party, in a brownstone on 114th, hopelessly separated from my friends, sitting on a couch and watching as the strobe lights changed moment to moment. They were fading from red to purple to blue, and then I looked over my shoulder and everything fell away for a moment because you were suddenly sitting right next to me. I don’t remember how we started talking exactly, but I remember talking about music and our classes and the weather, about how it was so much colder where you were from. Where were you from? Somewhere far away, you said, with that lazy smile of yours scrawled across your face, and I didn’t press the subject. 

I asked for your number and you said that you didn’t have one, but that you’d give me your email instead. I hadn’t met anyone without a cell number before, and the idea of communicating solely through email seemed appealingly retro. Even now, writing to you on the beat-up laptop that I’ve had since ninth grade, there’s something freeing about thinking in full sentences for once. We abbreviate too much these days, as if you could abbreviate real life. When I woke up the next day, the first notification on my phone was a message from you— “Would you like to get coffee?” 

What were we, Yana? I have a way of getting tangled up in other people’s expectations. When I was with Owen, I never knew how to act, how a relationship between two men ought to work—and so we spun out of each other’s orbits, and that was that. We were something else though, Yana. Maybe it’s the way you would snap me back to reality. Do you remember that night when we were coming back from Brighton Beach on the train, how you told me that I was entirely self-centered, but in an endearing way? I couldn’t help but laugh, because of course you were right. Even in this letter it’s all about me, me, me—but the thing is, I am trying to understand you all the same. And to understand you, I need to tell the story of us through the prism of myself. I can’t find another way. 

We spent a lot of time together as winter set in. Often enough, it seemed as though we were the only two people in the city who weren’t hurrying from one place to another to escape the cold. you always insisted on going out and exploring, even when I was happy to sit around and revel in central heating. And so we’d go out, to tiny restaurants deep in Queens, to the Japanese bookstore near Bryant Park, to the Cloisters, where you’d stare at little icons and silvery tapestries until the museum closed. Some days though, when we were too lazy to leave campus, we’d talk for hours in one of our rooms or just lie on my bed, listening to music. But when we grew silent I’d suddenly realize that I didn’t understand you at all. 

Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner

One day we were talking about Anna Karenina, and I mentioned that my favorite scene in it was when Anna’s on the train back to Petersburg and suddenly she has the revelation that she’s in love with Vronsky. You laughed at that, and then said that you’d never had any sympathy for Anna and her all-consuming pursuit of love, which startled me a bit. Did you really not find Anna’s desperation for love at least a little bit compelling? Not a bit, you responded, and then told me that in any case Tolstoy would have agreed with you. I wasn’t entirely sure about that, but I also wasn’t entirely sure what Tolstoy would have thought about anything, so I let the point stand. 

I never really know the weight of a moment until it’s long in the past. If I had done something differently on the night you left, would things have turned out like they did? There’s no way to know, but I keep going back to it anyway. That night, we went out with Amy and her friends to that one club in Bushwick. The weather said that a nor’easter was coming but we didn’t care, took the subway down to Brooklyn in an electric rush, found ourselves submerged in shuddering synths and kaleidoscopic lights before we knew it. I didn’t know what to do with myself until you took my hand. Maybe I’m just as foolish as Anna on her way to Petersburg, but when we danced together in the heart of the storm I knew where I was for the first time. Yana, what do you see in me? I want to be what you need, to find our way out of this maze together.

At the end of the night we found ourselves back on campus. Everyone else had slunk off in twos and threes and so it was just us, going down College Walk as flurries of snow swept in. The wind had picked up, and it was hard to see more than a few paces ahead. When we reached the place where our paths diverged I looked over at you, and you were staring right at me, as though you’d never really seen me before. You reached your hand out to me, but before I could take it, you were dissolving into a girl made of light, of little feathery crystals of snow. I tried to catch you, to hold you before you were swept away, but my arms passed right through where you should have been, and it was unbearably cold. The last thing I saw before I was swallowed by darkness and snow was the blue gleam in your eyes, like a reflection of a winter from long ago, a winter I forgot. 

The story people told was that you’d had to go home because of a family emergency. After a few weeks of being coddled and humored, I shut up about you and your disappearance. Then, sometime in the middle of March, an email from you arrived. There was no text, just a song from one of the Russian indie bands you liked to listen to some nights, when there was nothing left to talk about but we didn’t want to go to bed. I looked up the lyrics, translated them word by word. Без тебя останется только, я—without you remains just I. Is it wrong to wait for you, Yana? I have faith in you, you know, and so there’s nothing left to do but wait. I’m waiting for you every day, waiting for winter, waiting for snow.