trials
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I embarked on ritualistic quests—reading Russian short novels in the twilight,playing timed chess as minutes slipped like sand,fasting to one humble meal a day,drinking bitter espresso to puncture the haze,smoking in the quiet solitude of dusk,and pickling myself in vodka’s icy embrace,laboring until every morning,my limbs begged gentle guidancejust to stir into motion. In that
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“I will die. Morning arrived in a muted gray, the silence heavy, almost suffocating. I stood at the edge of our life together, fingers twitching with the impulse to reach out, to fix something already shattered. She had left in the night, returned without explanation. Her absence was a wound; her presence, a reminder
