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Dear Stranger,
There are nights in Moscow. Nights when the cold presses so hard against the glass that the frost turns black, that I am entirely convinced you are nothing more than a fever dreamt up by a lonely, fractured mind.
I lie awake in the dark and try to convince myself that you are real, but the math never works out. I try to trace the lines of you in my head, but you have no face I can fully remember when I open my eyes, no name I can speak out loud, no address where I could ever send this paper.
You are just a quiet, foreign idea—a ghost made of light and silence, that somehow slipped past every border, every guard, and every piece of armor I spent my entire life building. In my mind, you do not live in a real city with streets and traffic.
You exist in some vast, quiet, golden world on the other side of an ocean...brilliant, untouchable, and completely out of my reach.
I dreamt of you again last night. It happens every time I am too exhausted to keep my defenses up, every time the noise in my head finally quietens enough for the solitude to take over.
We were standing together on the ice in an arena with no lights, no scoreboards, and no crowd. Just the two of us, and the low, heavy hum of the refrigeration pipes running beneath our feet.
You were looking at me with those serious, impossibly clear eyes, and you reached out to touch my face. But every time your fingers brushed my skin, you dissolved into steam, like warm breath hitting cold winter air.
I reached for you until my shoulder ached, but my hands only closed around empty space.
When I woke up, my arm was still outstretched
over the cold mattress. For a second, just one terrible, hollow second. My chest collapsed so violently I couldn't catch my breath. I felt the physical absence of someone I have never even met, and the pain of it was so sharp, so real, that it terrified me.
It frightens me because I don't know what is happening to my mind anymore.
Lately, the line between waking up and staying asleep is starting to blur. I go through my day, I go to practice, I speak to the coaches, I laugh with my teammates, but half the time I feel like a ghost inhabiting my own body.
I sit on the bench and look at my own hands, clad in heavy gloves, and wonder who they belong to. I hear my own voice speaking Russian, making jokes, and it sounds like a recording played from another room. My head feels heavy, crowded with thoughts that don't belong to me, yet terrifyingly empty all at once.
Am I losing my mind?
Is this what happens when you spend too many hours on airplanes, too many nights in generic hotel rooms, too many years pretending that you don't need anyone?
Is my brain simply breaking under the weight of its own isolation, manufacturing a phantom just so I don't have to be alone in the dark?
How did a dream become the only thing I see when I close my eyes?
How did an idea across the sea become the center of gravity in a life I thought belonged to me?
In Russia, we are taught early that soft things do not survive. We learn that longing is a dangerous waste of energy, that beautiful things are meant to be broken, and that love is just a weakness you pay for later when everything is taken away.
I knew all of this.
I swore I would never be the fool standing in the cold, waiting for a shadow that isn't coming. I built myself to be tough, to be arrogant, to be unbothered by anything.
But this dream—this absurd, quiet obsession...is eroding me from the inside out, like water dripping on stone until the stone cracks open.
And yet, you haunt me while I am still alive.
You are in the quiet seconds between the sirens during a game.
You are in the heavy, suffocating silence of every sterile hotel room that smells like stale air and solitude.
You are in the sound of my own skates cutting into the ice when the rink is dark.
Sometimes, when we play against North American teams, I find myself searching the opposing bench, my eyes darting frantically from face to face, looking for a pair of eyes that feel familiar.
Occasionally, I cross paths with that boy from Canada; Hollander, the one with the quiet demeanor, the neat hair, and the rigid, terrifying discipline. For a fraction of a second, when he looks at me across the ice, my chest tightens with a sudden, violent sensation of recognition. My heart hits my ribs like a trapped bird.
Is it him?
I think, feeling completely insane.
Could it be him?
But then the whistle blows. He looks away, or he hits me hard into the glass, or he scores a goal and walks past me without a second glance, and the illusion shatters. It is just my mind playing cruel tricks on me.
It is just exhaustion and desperation trying to attach a real face, a real rival, to a phantom because the silence in my head is getting too loud to bear.
I feel foolish afterward.
I feel ashamed that I am looking for an angel in the middle of a brutal game, that I am projecting my pathetic longings onto a guy who probably hates my guts.
It would be a mercy if you stayed just a dream, whoever you are.
It truly would.
Because if you were real, if you actually existed somewhere in the world, I would have to carry an even more unbearable weight; the knowledge that somewhere out there, breathing warm air in a brightly lit room, is a person living a clean, perfect life where I could only ever be a secret.
A shadow.
A dangerous, ruined mistake.
To want a ghost is safe, I suppose.
A ghost cannot reject you.
A ghost asks for nothing back.
But to love a dream like this, to carry a phantom in my chest while I move through a cold, unfeeling world...is driving me crazy. It is like holding a blade by the edge, squeezing tighter every day, and wondering why my hands won't stop bleeding.
Stay where you are, stranger. Stay in the warm light of my mind, and let me keep you in the dark where you belong, before I lose what little is left of myself trying to reach you.
— Ilya