Back at Pavel’s apartment, I smoked more cigarettes on the balcony, my stomach riled up with hunger and nicotine, and tried to remind myself that this corseting loneliness was temporary, that I’d look back at me on this balcony from some future place and remember it as terrible, beautiful, too, the trees outside with their round, hard leaves and the men who stood close when I lit their cigarettes so I could see the flame reflected in their eyes. But as I looked around the apartment I’d have to leave soon, with no plan as to where I’d go next, the idea of some future ease kept losing out to the
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