Oh those nights

I didn’t want that night to end.

Maybe for the first time ever, I actually felt comfortable in a huge crowd of people where, at best, I only vaguely knew three or four. I didn’t know half of their names, and honestly, I didn’t need to. Their faces stayed behind in my memory like blurred snapshots, stamped only with the date of that night—mixed up with shouts, laughter, the clink of glasses…

I knew nights like this don’t happen often, so I desperately tried to capture everything: the crème-brûlée colored walls I’ll never see again, the pyramid of tangled legs on the floor, the smell of wet leaves drifting in through the wide-open window, the coolness of the kitchen floor under my jeans, the frantic fingers scraping at the strings of an atrociously out-of-tune guitar, and that almost tangible feeling of something warm, soft, flowing, and ringing-like our voices.

It’s funny how chance pulled so many different people into a single kitchen.

For one fleeting moment, all our scattered lines crossed at the same point in time… and then unraveled back into separate directions.

We wouldn’t even recognize each other on the street if we ever crossed paths.

The guitar kept wandering from hand to hand, and I tried to hold onto the roughness of its strings for as long as possible. Somehow, a girl being comfortable with a guitar felt like something rare and strangely precious to them.

I also love that the story of my songs will never spill beyond that night. It will stay locked inside it, like a candle flame that burned once and went out without leaving smoke.

We sang all together, I sang alone, we sang in two voices. Meanwhile, the night thinned out, silver cracks started opening in the sky… and I felt both distant from the entire world and impossibly, absurdly happy.

*written 23.07.2013 Ах эти ночи - Snow's

*translated into Eng 7.09.2025