Ode to Oleg

Subject: Ode to Oleg
From: Alia
Date: 14 Aug 2017

How on earth did it happen?

It makes me laugh, it makes me smile, but I don’t understand how we came so far into this friendship that you’d share with me and I with you our idiosyncratic insecurities and neurosis, and yet we both seem so incapable of sharing our burgeoning feelings for one another?

I feel I’m in a game, a silly one!

A game I feel I will remain stuck in until I wake up and get honest with you!! I want you, you great twit of a man! Don’t you see that???? And, I feel you want me too! Otherwise, why on earth have we Skyped every Sunday for 2 hours for 6 months when you tell me you are a schizoid with narcissistic overtones and have no desire for friends or relationships, un-yet you are contemplating finding a wife and starting a family, but not now, next year – after travelling in winter 2018!!!! And you say if you have a wife and child, you will be a good husband and father, but you will be unhappy and why does that have to be Oleg? You once referred to me as a “fun distraction” from your work of which you are soooo obsessed with, so why should you contemplate a marriage where your wife would make you unhappy!!

Sometimes, I believe we are two peas in a pod, you are my twin, born and raised in Odessa, Ukraine and I, I was born in Spring. Your awkward gestures and childlike responses come to rest so endearingly on my heart, whilst your often times devilish smile and impish eyes send it a flutter. You are heartbreakingly vulnerable in your honesty at times, and brutal at other moments with your flashing eyes and quick sarcasm, but I know with you, to take the rough with the smooth and I accept you Professor Oleg just as you are, in all your neurotic splendour and lack of libido.

You are a best friend from yesteryear, a bright, spunky ten year old companion to go camping in the woods, ride bikes and pick mushrooms with. You are silly and uninhibited and a touch fragile too, you are my consumptive Golden Prince; my Aubrey Beardsley and my Man who Fell to Earth. I want to take care of you, to serve you, to show you decency and loyalty and, to my shame, I want to mother you.

But alas, we are so awkward and bashful, that I cannot tell you of my great fantasies, and you cannot express, except through little musings and shy looks and mystical projection what it is you want from me. Oh how I wish with the whole of my heart that I was younger Oleg, because I know I could have you then. I could offer my body as a vessel for your longed for child and together we could raise him in cotton-wool, but I am old Oleg, too old and spooky for your off-spring, so again I will stand by quietly and watch the man I want to love, flounder and flourish in someone else’s garden of Eden.

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