Meeting Yourself
Promising someone a "meeting with yourself" is like promising a dentist appointment. Beneficial, but you don't want to go. 🦋
Reflections
My name is Alex Bon. I am a psychologist and writer from Ukraine.
In a world full of noise, I write quiet stories.
So you can hear yourself.
Two Plus Two
Sometimes 2+2=5, if it helps a person survive the night. 🦋
Defragmentation
Gleb hung upside down. The world flipped three seconds ago. Before that, Gleb was a successful architect in a two-thousand-euro suit, rushing to a meeting to present a model of a forty-story needle. Now Gleb was a chunk of flesh trapped in the chewed metal of an Audi lying in a ditch. The seatbelt pressed into his collarbone with the enthusiasm of...
Happy Meal
Olga stood in line at the gas station with a pistol in her hand. A fuel pistol. Premium 95. In her other hand - a breast. The left one. Three-month-old Vanya was latched onto it, strapped in with some elaborate harness system that turned motherhood into an extreme sport. The tank showed 23 liters and 38 kopecks when Vanya bit down with his teeth....
Who Are You Waiting For When Waiting For Love?
At the root of almost every emotional pain in relationships lies a quiet, barely audible whisper: "They don't value me again." We desperately search in another person for that look, that word, that action which will finally prove our worth to us. We wait to be accepted whole. And in this expectation lies the main paradox. We seek acceptance from...
Rescue Contract
Mark was eating soup. Loudly, or so it seemed to Lena. She sat across from him, looking not at him but through him. In her head, invisible to the human eye yet heavy as a tombstone, lay the Instruction Manual. Item 42: "When I come home tired, he must notice within the first three seconds, come over, hug me, and ask what happened before I even...
History Written by Individuals
History is written not by peoples, but by individuals with their traumas and ambitions. 🦋
Truth in the Space Between
Truth is born not in a single point, but in the space between all possible perspectives. 🦋
Where Dragons Dwell
New continents are not discovered by following maps. They're discovered when the ship veers off course. When the captain makes a "mistake". When someone decides to sail not where the compass points, but toward the place where, rumor has it, dragons dwell. 🦋
Vasya and the Important Talk
Vasya had been sitting on the toilet for twenty minutes now, even though he'd finished his business by the third. It's just that out there, behind the door, in the kitchen, Marina was sitting and waiting for him for an "important talk." An "important talk" meant things were fucked. Vasya knew this. After eight years of marriage, he'd learned her...
Wheel of Fortune
On Tuesday, Vadim was fired. It was done with the grace of a guillotine: swift, cold, and under a "thanks for your cooperation." Vadim walked outside. November slapped his face with a wet rag. His phone buzzed in his pocket - his wife asking him to buy peas and mayo. Vadim looked at the screen. He was thirty-eight, he had a mortgage on a concrete...
The Raccoon and the Cotton Candy
Pavel woke up at three in the morning with the thought that he was a counterfeit person. As if the real Pavel had gotten lost somewhere along the way. In the darkness, he fumbled for his phone and typed into the search bar: "how to know if you don't know how to live." Google suggested depression tests. Pavel closed the browser. At work, he was...
The Best Form of Self-Discovery
The best form of self-discovery is trying to explain yourself to others. 🦋
A Mistake Is a Telegram from Reality
A mistake isn’t a blot on your biography. It’s a telegram from reality. 🦋
Love by the Tech Spec
A modern person is not searching for love. They open a Project. Every Project arrives with a technical brief. Specifications designed to engineer safety. Height - "from", weight - "up to" so you can feel protected or showcase your status. Age - "under", to avoid colliding with somebody else's fatigue. Financial protocol - "no lower", to sidestep a...
Project "Kostya"
Anya loved sliders. Not the soft cotton ones newborns wear. Anya loved the sliders inside her dating app. They gave her an intoxicating sense of control, as if she were not a lonely girl in a rented studio but a deity creating Adam with a single swipe. Swipe right: height from 185. Cut off the short men who could never fake a stone wall. Swipe...
The Sound of the Key
That sound of the key in the lock. It isn’t just the sound of coming home. It’s the most honest sound in your entire day. It’s the click that turns off the version of you the world got to see. 🦋
Fon
When Fons first launched, the slogan was silly and honest: “Fon - the one who is always on your side.” At first it was just another clever AI helper on the phone. Then in the earbuds. Then in the lenses. Then simply everywhere you happened to be. Lev got his Fon at thirty. Until then he considered himself an old-school adult: real conversations,...
Gratitude Ledger
After Sasha left, Ira had three things: a cactus, the charger from his laptop, and the feeling that someone owed her money for time. The cactus stared from the windowsill as if to say, “I am not involved.” The charger lay on the table like a tiny piece of evidence. And the sense of debt was already serious. \- Four years, - she told the cactus. -...
The Past Is a Textbook
The past is a textbook, not a torture chamber. 🦋