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[Alexandr Korol]

— Alex, you’ve already understood that Russia is not the place to go.
— Well, all right. Yes, I understood.

Although I was just about to tell him that maybe I’d at least fly in for the summer
now. He says no. And he still hints that I should go to South America. It’s still
unknown, he says:

— You’ll be surprised yourself at how it’ll be highlighted for you in the near
future — what country it is, what city it is. And even some people will turn up
who’ll support you. So it’ll all happen by itself now. Don’t hurry at all, everything
will come by itself. Everything is decided.
— All right, thank you.

Here’s some more news. I told a couple of my friends about how I met with the
girl. And for some reason now, these last six months, it happens that to many
close people — not readers, but precisely close people, friends — I give certain
advice, make proposals, say where the darkness is, where the light is, but I say
it in a very rough, direct form. As if there are no more options: either this way
or that way, or that’s it, the end. And so when I told about how I talked with
this girl Serafima, one boy — and what’s most interesting, even two boys who
had themselves been in her position — immediately latched onto this and say:
“Alexandr, well, you see, if the task was, figuratively speaking, to persuade the
girl, to come to an agreement with her, then it has to be conveyed in a different
form.” And I explain: “You don’t understand. It’s not I who am doing it, it’s the
system doing it. Whereas you judge everything by yourselves, by your minds — the
way you love to talk someone round for gain, to chatter at them, to bend before
someone, to smile at someone artificially. I can’t do that. And it doesn’t drive me
at all. It’s the system doing it. I’m maybe ashamed on the system’s own behalf,
considering that it can say things like that, and then it’s I who catch the comeback
aimed at my face, you understand?” So then, for some reason, from November
to this very day, this system says to all these people, roughly and directly: “If you
don’t get a grip, you’re done for. You’ll burn in hell, in eternal torments.” And
not one of these people listened to me. Not one. And they reacted, naturally,
even more negatively. And a fellow asks me yesterday why I do it this way.