Otherwise We are Lost

It was one, long fluid movement. A continuous flow of actions. There was no one point where I was thinking he does this and I do that. It was natural and beautiful. He sat on my bed, wearing only his boxers, waiting for me.

I hesitated. My body was not what it was before. The rigors of ballet training had given me a slender body, almost child-like, but now my body was rounded and curved in places that used to be lean and packed with muscle, not like the bodies Sergei was used to or assumed, he preferred.

I grasped the hem of my dress and then I pulled it off over my head. I could feel his eyes on me and my skin felt like it was on fire yet a shiver ran through me as my goose bumps dotted my flesh.

His hand ran from knee to my thigh and finally rested on my stretchmark-covered hip in gentle caress and he looked up at me. The moonlight streaming in through the window made his pale, bluish, grayish, greenish eyes look almost silver, “You’re so beautiful,” He whispered and he pulled me down into a long kiss that seemed to last the whole night.



My fingers traced the outlines of the tattoos and the scars that marked his body. “Did you do this to yourself?” I asked as I traced the four diagonal lines on his left pectoral that resembled a panther’s scratch.

“Yes,” Sergei paused, “The tattoo I got there was this ugly orange color, so I cut the color out.” He said it so bluntly, so coldly, so unattached that it scared me. “I call them my tiger scratches,” He added with a smile.

“And these?” I traced the two other long, thin scars that crisscrossed his torso.

“I did those, too. I saw a movie and the character had scars like these and I liked them,” he said so nonchalantly. He reached over where his pants were in a heap on the floor and pulled out a carton of cigarettes, “Do you mind?”

I shook my head.

“Do you want one?” The slender white cylinder hung lazily out of the corner of his mouth and he seemed to match his James Dean tattoo.

I nodded and took the cigarette and placed it between my lips.

Instead of using the lighter, he leaned in and with his cigarette and carefully touched it to the end of mine. His eyes locked with mine and we both inhaled, igniting mine in a ring of fire and a cloud of smoke.

I was startled by the intimacy of it. My hand traced down his side, over the large tattoo of the grim reaper, to rest on his hip, to the three lines of English. “What does this mean?” I asked, trying to decode the foreign language before me.

“I am not a Human. I am not a God. I am how I am,” he translated for me.

I skimmed over the wolf tattoo on his left hip and the large, “You have another one, on your back that’s in English too. What does that one say?”

“Forgive me Tiger,” he said in English and the he repeated it for me in Russian, “I don’t know why I got that one, but I did. Maybe I wanted to atone for my sins.”

I suddenly felt aware of the tattooed arm wrapped around me, holding me close to him, the cross on his forearm, the Russian eagle on the back of his hand, the James Dean tattoo on his bicep. They scare me, the tattoos and the scars. They were as much a part of him as his pale, blue-green-grey eyes and brown wavy hair, yet they weren’t. He didn’t inherit them from his mother or father. He hammered them in with a needle and ink. They were a permanent reminder of his past and hopefully not a prediction of his future.



“Drink some of the wine,” Igor gestured to Sergei’s still full glass of wine.

Sergei obliged, drinking it large gulps like he did when he was living alone in London with only cheap alcohol and drugs to keep him company.

“No, no,” Igor picked up his own wine glass, “You want to enjoy it. This isn’t some cheap wine in a box,” He swirled the wine in his glass, inhaling the scent, gesturing for Sergei to do the same, “What do you smell?”

“Cocoa,” Sergei said slowly as the delicate scent wafted up to him, “Yes, cocoa.”

“Now drink in small sips. Appreciate the complexity,” Igor paused to take a bit of his pasta, “You stayed with Lara last night.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement, a fact.

“She is an old friend. We are from the same town, went to the same gymnastics gym and then the same studio and then to Kiev together, but she was not accepted by the Royal Ballet.” Sergei was slightly unnerved at Igor’s knowledge of his whereabouts.

“Hm,” Igor drank his wine, “A shame isn’t it? She’s a lovely girl whose soul longs to dance but her body is not made for ballet. Her head too large, her neck too short, her body too stocky. A true tragedy,” There was a sadness in Igor’s eyes.

“Ballet is not a modeling industry. It’s about dancing.”

“Hm,” Igor paused as he took another sip of wine, “I suppose you are right, but I suppose it’s easy for you to say that. You have it all. God made your body to dance ballet,” He swirled the wine around in his glass, before taking a long drink of it, “I must ask you, Sergei, what your intentions with her are. I care deeply for her,” After noticing the steely glint in Sergei’s eyes, Igor added, “She is like a daughter to me.”

Sergei paused and he didn’t know how to articulate what he felt. Slowly he found the words, “She keeps the darkness away.”