Did I tell you there was a restaurant with a beautiful glass house called One & Only just across the street from here? Didn’t you call me that once in your writings? You didn’t own the damn thing, did you?
I’m not a shrine you offer tributes to. Worse than being on a pedestal is being a damn shrine as if I’m a thousand years old and not a real person. I’m not to be cherished in spirit or in memory. I walk, I breathe, I feel, I hurt and am hurt. I’m an actual human being.
You cannot blame me for failing to show an appreciation for your devoted idolatry when you don’t tell me of these things. And what woman wants to be worshipped in idolatry and in name and in name only? Believe it or not even porn stars and Hollywood starlets want to be treated like they are human beings first and foremost and women second and what they do for a living third. You spent too much of your life living in that lonely, depressing country where people worship idols and cartoon fantasies are a billion dollar business. It’s childish and idiotic. It makes men socially inept however polite and respectful they may be. Men over there are so terrified of women they masturbate to paper characters and collect anime figurines wearing a sexy, revealing outfit. Personally I find that uniquely disturbing and insulting. The way I was insulted when it turns out you didn’t know anything about who I was as a person. And so you misinterpreted everything I said and did and got angry over nothing because you didn’t know how I would react to things and how I would behave in a certain situation that’s in line with my inner temperament, my adopted values and beliefs, my lived history and personal experiences. You weren’t curious about me as a person. You weren’t interested in me as a person. To you, I was just an idol. A projection of fantasy. A shrine. You think I like having poems penned in my name which was why you kept doing it and you were doing it for months and months. But why do you think that? Do I actually? Because I’m a woman? Do most men like having random fangirls write them poems devoted to them personally? Do most women with random men? Especially when there is little to no shared history between them? Don’t people just find that creepy? And say women are charmed by it.. but do I? Me? Me. Not some random woman or an average woman or most women. Me. It’s me you’re interacting with. Me as a real person. As a personality. Not as a personage and an idol. You’ve flattened me beyond recognition to the point where it stops you from being curious about me at all. Which is what relationship building is. You haven’t been building a relationship with me. You have been building a shrine for me. And I don’t think most people like that, be it women or men.
You cannot blame me for failing to appreciate what you’ve done for me when it is YOU who failed to learn what it is that I appreciate and what it is that I don’t. You missed your marks. It is as simple as that. That’s what one-to-one conversations are for which was something we didn’t really share in Phuket. And do I look like someone who is susceptible to believing that everything around me is a sign from the sky carefully orchestrated by a star-crossed lover who is actually my soulmate? Because that’s just dumb. It offends my deepest inner being to be dumb. To be delusional. To be erotomaniac. You bank on me being delusional enough to buy into your romance scheme in the shadows. That’s just the opposite of who I am. You missed your marks again.
I’m explaining to you why I didn’t bring it up sooner. One and Only for example even though I suspected that one probably ten months ago. But maybe it’s been your plan all along to astonish me as well as to destabilise me. You want me to be unnerved and unsettled. You want me to have a unique experience no one else in the world could deliver. And for that, you may have just won me over with your madness.
But that’s not what I want from you. I don’t want grand romantic gestures in the shadows or out in the open. I want someone who demonstrates care and affection. You don’t have to be overly affectionate. I don’t like affectionate men. I like thoughtful men who are deliberate and intentional with the things they do and say. Not men who casually lie or disrespect me all the time. I want someone who understands me when I say, “you keep fomenting our antagonism towards each other by your silence and distance” and then actually does something to improve the situation. Not someone who gets hurt and defensive taking to twitter whinging and wringing their hands in despair. That’s avoidance. That’s immaturity. That’s undependability. Women just want grown men, dude. At least women from the civilised world. I don’t know what it is that goes on in your part of the world. No wonder Andre and his ex-wife who should have been a beautiful couple by the world’s standard fell embarrassingly flat on their ugly asses and were bafflingly clueless as to why that was. They don’t call you primitive savages with a primitive conscience for no reason. Men and women lack a great deal of what’s human in them. They lack the intellectual acumen and psychological understanding and moral responsibility and human compassion. For example, they would think that your grandiose romantic schemes alone should blot out everything that’s happened between us since then. They would think it should be enough. It should count for everything. Everything else is irrelevant. And that if I were to put up a resistance then it means I am ungrateful or deliberately and provocatively playing a game or playing hard to get. They couldn’t bring themselves to think beyond these simple pain points because they are not capable of thinking beyond them. And this has been what underlies our friction and tension and contention all this time. You interpret everything uncharitably and limitedly because you grew up in an uncharitable limited culture among uncharitable limited people. People whose understanding of themselves and others is constrained by their impoverished one-dimensional thinking and behaving and co-existing. But I’m back on insults again. That’s not the vibe and tone I want to lead with today.
I’ve already said this to you and it quietly incenses me when what I say is not being registered by my partner. That what you’ve done so far has earned my attention and that was the major part of why I tried to engage with you last year. But the engagement then fell short. Very short. To be fair as I’ve said we were overwhelmed and stressed out by what was going on around us. Things have calmed down since. I want us to try again. I don’t think you’ve been deliberately cruel. I think you lack the confidence from your anxiety especially towards me. I think you write to recover and re-project your invincibility because that’s the stupid Russian customs. God forbid the Russians ever develop self-consciousness in some form.
Do you know that emotions can be calmed and placated and understood and modified whether by the person experiencing them or the person experiencing them with? Emotions are not a natural order of things where they get emitted occasionally like the sun’s coronal ejection and there’s no more to it than that. That emotions are somehow experienced by the person emoting them and that’s all that there is to the entire process. In a socially intelligent world, emotions are shared, registered, reciprocated, ameliorated, understood by another person especially the one responsible for them. That’s how humans bond. I would say that’s the only way humans can bond. Emotions are not meant to be experienced in isolation. And that’s why you write. Because your culture does not permit it otherwise. And the people within it do not have the means or the skills or the knowledge to deal with them intelligently and kindly and effectively. But that’s not to say the rest of the world is like this. And I don’t want you to think I’m like this.
You’re going to have to start talking to me though. You don’t understand that the more you don’t, the more I see you as being terrified of me. Which is okay, but then you don’t get to keep me jobless and poor because you’re terrified of me. You have no rights to keep me jobless and poor to avoid dealing with your fear. You choose your fear over my future and comfort again. In the same way you chose your fear over my safety and wellbeing when the limbs of your friends started to fly. You choose to cling onto your fear. Why? You’ve been doing it forever. When are you going to stop doing it?
I believe in you. No one does though, but I do. Doesn’t that count for anything? Are you going to choose your fear over me?
I know you don’t appreciate me. If you do, we wouldn’t be like this. Not talking. You do not appreciate how much work I’ve put into myself over the past year so I am able to speak with you in calmness and with clarity and on an equal footing with you for the most part. Because that’s what you want. I know that’s what you want. You seem to be able to only grasp tangible things – restaurants in my name and words on your twitter – and not the patience and understanding and kindness required of me to deal with you throughout all our extraordinary ordeals. This is because of the non-mental nature of a Russian. Which is why I’m saying: you don’t appreciate me enough. Because you don’t see it. Because you don’t grasp it. Because you need your 4D glasses.
You want us to have a flawless love story and happily ever after, right? You fear of things going wrong and not being able to measure up to a neat faultless ending in your head? That’s a very primitive way of thinking. You think it’s romantic and quixotic and legendary. I think it’s infantile and unrealistic and delusional. I have enough emotional capacity to understand what real life between two people entails. Do you? You have been in serious relationships before, correct? It would be quite insulting if you assume I am defined by my young age and so you fear of disappointing me playing house with each other. I think we’ll be fine at the end of the day. You shouldn’t overreact at the slightest hiccups as you have been. You need to learn to mediate yourself and regulate your emotions and hold yourself to a civilised standard of behaviour. People think it’s your personal defect. Personally I think it’s cultural. It’s so cultural it’s so obvious. In some very undeveloped cultures, men are not capable of controlling their emotions be it anger or desire. They have no mediation within themselves whatsoever. They do not even have what is called “emotions” proper. They have what is called “feelings”. Mediated and processed feelings constitute emotions. Emotions are intellectually understood as are the circumstances surrounding the emotions. The cause, the context, the resolution, the solution. Feelings are mere senses in our body registered by our brain. The cause and nature of such feelings are obscured. They come and go. There’s no rhyme or reason to them. They arise and they die down. They are never properly dissected or understood. In some cultures, people experience mere feelings but never emotions.
And you don’t understand how much I’ve mediated and regulated both my feelings and emotions when I deal with you. You don’t. Why would you appreciate it when it’s a behaviour so foreign to you? And this is just the emotional layer. Then there’s the moral layer. Why? Why am I doing it? Out of duty? Responsibility? Sense of right and wrong? Sense of mission? World peace? The moral layer then informs or shapes the emotional layer (it is this that’s deeply lacking in your culture). Then comes the intellectual layer. How I went about doing it. If you noticed, I started watching Fear Factor early this year. Do you know why? Then I started watching Love Island. Why do you think that is? Prior to this I’ve curated my playlist to mollify my own feelings and behaviours. Do you even know I was doing these things? Do you think they are simply random happenstances? That I just do them because I feel like it? Do you think I am in any way like you and your people who could barely be said to possess any emotional layer to begin with?
If you want to recognise my efforts, here’s your chance. I took time to explain to you all these things because we need to know of them so we can move forward together without much friction. As I’ve said before, if you were to be born in the West with the parents who were raised to be kind and insightful, you probably wouldn’t have to suffer much at all as a hypersensitive extraordinarily intelligent individual. And if your Western parents were crap or even abusive, you would have friends and teachers and communities of people who would be more than willing to provide you moral and emotional support as well as intellectual understanding. You’d grow into yourself by 25. You’d find a female peer of equal standing who could understand you and nurture you. This is the NORM in the West and elsewhere. Instead, your culture and people are so dim and dumb you are still this way in your 50s. You’re not a difficult person. You’re that 15 year-old self who grew up in a primitive backwater with no real knowledge or insight into anything that matters and so never properly matured as a person. You never learned to respect others, value honesty and integrity, denounce force and intimidation and inequality and injustice. And so you’re misshapen and miserable. You have no tools to navigate life, no emotional capacity to endure hardships though life is full of them, no social abilities and support to make it bearable in the short term or the long term. The fact that you date low-value chicks who are essentially uneducated and uncouth says all about how uneducated and uncouth your culture actually is. It’s so stupid it’s astounding. This is probably because intelligence for the Russians never translates to real intellect and insight and knowledge and wisdom and kindness and understanding. Moral and intellectual layers are sorely lacking. Emotional layer barely half-formed. It’s like witnessing you lie, lie, lie so compulsively and then bitch, bitch, bitch about how your relationships are unhappy and never enduring. It’s so stupid it’s astounding.
And it wasn’t until I came across your two other friends that I realised: it’s not just you, it’s all of you. Because given all your personalities and your educational and economic opportunities in life, it shouldn’t have been this way. There’s no way it could have been this way. The lacks are so prominent and consistent and profound. And that’s when I realised the culprit is the culture.
What do you want me to say to your shrines in my name? Do you not understand why I’m angry because of this? What does that accomplish? What does that have anything to do with me? Why didn’t you tell me? You cannot blame other people for not “getting” you when you don’t try to convey clearly to them your intentions. You cannot assume people will just “get” you. Don’t you learn this by now? Does your culture not teach you this? Does your culture not teach you anything on how to get along with others and co-exist peacefully with others? Why is everything so senseless and silly with you? And it’s not just you. With your friend, it’s the same problem all over again. You don’t think the Americans and the Europeans gang up on you because you look different from them, do you? You all look literally the same to me. So where’s the tribal animosity from? Any ideas? It cannot just be ideological and historical at this point. I can tell you, you are so different from them in the most unpleasant ways possible. The Americans have more in common with the Thais than with you Russians believe it or not. And you don’t get it. You don’t get why people think and act differently to things in different unexpected ways. You’re not even curious about it. You’re not curious about people. You’re not curious about encounters or events. You’re not curious about things going wrong and why they went wrong. And you take it personally all the time. Everything is straightforward, selfish, simplistic, personal, untrustworthy. Like that’s just hateful, you know. People find that kind of thing hateful. It’s like you always lead with ego and never with understanding. “I’ve done these things for you and so you should appreciate them”. Sure. But what if I’m exasperated with the endless displacement and postponement of your confession of love for me? That it’s just another way to offload your feelings without doing anything about them and making anything materialised? Maybe I have an intellectual viewpoint here. Maybe I value a romantic pragmatist over an idle fantasist. Maybe I value efficiency over procrastination. Maybe I value people who take chances over people who are fearful. Maybe I view your romantic schemes to be morally dubious and irresponsible. Have you ever thought of these things? Ever been curious about my thoughts and my ideas? What I value and what I think and what I feel? Because what you do instead is to dismiss everything going on with me and proclaim loudly, “she’s ungrateful and selfish and she hates me!”. That’s all the thoughts that run through your head because that’s all the thoughts that run through any Russian head.
You still refuse to interact with me or understand me when you keep clinging onto that fear without any regard for what I need and want. It’s like only your feelings and thoughts and viewpoints and experiences matter and I figure somewhat as a decorative ornament within them. This is literally what Russian people do to one another. This is what infuriates me. And it is this internal lack that dwarfs all the expensive shrines in my name. Maybe they don’t figure as largely because it is NOT the thing I value because I am NOT a Russian who would value such things in and of themselves. Have you ever thought this way? Do all Russians value materialised wealth especially in romantic idolatry? You know, your thinking as per your culture is so primitive it becomes so homogeneous and predictable such that the moment someone deviates from it then they are devious in some way. They are treasonous. They are ungrateful. They have hidden motives. Don’t you see how simplistic the authoritarian culture makes you? How judgemental and incurious and egoistical? It’s just so exhausting dealing with someone like this. Why can’t you be open-minded and charitable and curious? You cannot appreciate the diversity in people’s thoughts and experiences because it’s so different from what you know. And it bleeds through your interactions with me all the time.
Why does it have to be messy and senseless? Don’t you think that puts you in the negative with me? Why does it have to be so difficult and painful? I know Russians don’t care about such a thing because they have no moral sensitivity and concern. I haven’t seen any of you exhibit them. But it matters to me. Do you register that? I’m not saying this as an insult. I’m saying this as a piece of information you need to know about me. You need to register, grasp, and understand this important detail because it speaks to who I am. I’ve been trying to understand you all this time and you couldn’t be bothered to do the same for me. All you write is about your goddamn feelings. Over and over and over. You never registered what I said. You didn’t know or care why I said them. I’m not even human to you.
— Salisa to Anton, August 4th, 2026
