I needed to check something, so I went to my Sept. 2004 archive - and got stuck there, re-reading the Sept. 1, 2 and 3 entries...

It does not feel like a year ago, it feels like I've just finished watching the storming of the school live on TV...

Here's one thing I never wrote about then but which I'll never forget:

After it was over, I went outside, to buy cigarettes or something. I was walking toward Sennaya Ploshchad (we still lived in St. Pete then), people around me seemed unreal, but I did pay attention to two teenage girls walking ahead of me. They were dressed up in that careless, teenage, way, one had blue nails and the other had purplish hair, and they were talking about school and boys. One thing I caught was about their classes having been cancelled that day. Which didn't surprise me at all. Then the mother of one of the girls called her on her cell phone - she wanted to know when her daughter would be back home, and she wanted her back home soon. The girl sounded annoyed and whiny, she said she wouldn't be too late, but it didn't look like she meant it. And her mother probably insisted, and finally I heard the girl say, reluctantly, Okay, mama, I'm on my way home. And I felt something of a relief - because if she'd continued pissing her mama off on a day like that, I would've caught up with her and explained what kind of things her mama had just spent an afternoon watching and how that was more than enough reason for her to want her daughter back home early...