Becoming Her by Maria Ponomaryova

We met somewhere in the centre of Kyiv,

I don't even remember where. My very first memory was the discrepancy between my expectations and reality. The primary thing I noticed was her monotonous voice, which sounded distant, as if it was solely intended to fill the space, not to be heard by the interlocutor. As she spoke, the euphoria of the new meeting evaporated somewhere. She moved calmly, but chaotically, like a child who is just learning to coordinate in space, waving her limbs.

I was wearing my mother's dark raincoat, and underneath it was a white shirt close in colour to the shade of my exhausted skin at the beginning of my first year at university. I looked unhealthy but conventionally attractive, so she complimented me. 

I did not enjoy the praise of my appearance; it seemed too obvious and inevitable. The compliment was begged by blue-grey eyelids and a body exhausted from daily running, so I wasn't surprised.

As soon as my distrust fell asleep, I let her dominate the conversation. These were arrogant, unsubstantiated judgments of a person whose superficiality was mockingly hidden behind parasitizing on authoritative names and pseudo-intellectual accumulation of random scientific terms. However, I realized this only later, at that moment her figure seemed self-ironic, as if she knew how ridiculous she sounded.

During her empty monologues, she did not give me the opportunity to speak. It was clear that I was not the central character here, I was only given the opportunity to be her audience. I had to be grateful to her even for giving me this fortune. The most painful for me is the position of a person whose expression is blocked by the interlocutor. Her remarks stimulated my thoughts with their absurdity, and I wanted to object to her, but she did not give me the opportunity to share them. 

At the same time, when her stream of consciousness ended, and I started to speak, I could not help but feel that my personality was being fragmented in an attempt to digest it. She never asks for opinion, she doesn't care, she rather forces you to speak in front of her, like professional fortune-tellers do. Behind her seemingly detached and uninvolved face was an absorption of my every syntactic compound. She was stringing them on her naked skeleton, mounting them as weapons with which she would soon engage in a verbal confrontation. Probably with me, too.

We were friends for several years. Until I felt that this person had stolen my identity, I saw parts of myself in her: her speech, her friends, her cultural background, her preferences. But the worst thing was that I was slowly becoming her, too.