Chapter 2.

The first morning of September was foggy. When I woke up and looked out of my window at 6 a.m., trees and nearby buildings were hidden in clouds, in thick grey mist, still and liveless. And while the first evening of Semtember was dying outside, night was coming closer, and the black sky was starting to drop tears down to Earth. That first rain of September suddenly reminded me when and how I started to live in St. Petersburg.

I was born here, actually, but the day before my first birthday my family arrived to the small, really small town in Murmansk region, on Kolsky Peninsula, where we all spent next sixteen years. Of course, every now and then, sometimes even every year, we got back to St. Petersburg, for the summer vacation and sometimes in the middle of winter or fall, but I've always felt like a guest there. I have never thought I am going to live there, so when I finally moved here for good, I didn't quite realized that this city was going to be my home. In the beginning I was too busy getting ready for the exams at the university, after that I was too busy trying to understand what I was going the do with the last weeks of summer... And suddenly it happened. First day of September. First day of another life. My parents were still in our small town Gadzhiyevo, I was here with my grandmother and relatives, but for the first time in my life I was alone. Alone with my new life. That was amazing. Scary, unexpected, surprizing, even painful, but amazing. That was the first day of September, 1999.

I think it's because of that for me this city stands for fall. And I like fall. I like it because it's a season when Summer goes soft and quiet, when Persephone looks at me with smile, shuts the door behind summer's back, locking all the heat and green out, and turns her face to me, and I see her bright eyes with orange flame deep inside, I see her red locks and fiery dress. She is strong and proud, and neither rain nor leaden dome of everlasting clouds above my head can make me feel blue. She is too beautiful.

But not the city. I can't explain it properly, but the city is too gloomy, too wet, too dirty under this beautiflul garment of fall. I am a man of the North, I haven't really seen what is fall like in a big city, because where I come from there are only two seasons, winter and the other one, so I just wasn't prepared for this. So, this mixture consisting of recency and inhospitality and drearyness in time transformed into something vague, something I couldn't define. Only a couple of years ago I realized what is was.

The city reminded me of a swamp.

Long ago I've seen a real swamp. That swamp was vast and foggy, but, unlike the swamps most people know of, it was mute. No frogs, no bubbling, no cues of crickets or something, only silence and smoky white fog all around me, so thick that words and cries would've drowned in it. That swamp wasn't scary, I would've said it just wasn't glad to see me, neither as a guest, nor as a victim. It wasn't glad to see me, but at the same time it had no intention to make me go away. I felt like I was a kind of evil necessity, and it was not a nice feeling.

And the city was very much like that swamp from my childhood. When my life here had started, St Petersburg was cold, foggy, wet and not happy about me being here at all. And very soon this became  mutual.