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He took a folded paper from his coat pocket and placed it on my small bedside table without saying anything for several seconds.
I looked at the paper, then at his hands, and noticed that one thumbnail had been bitten almost to the skin.
“Misha,” I said quietly, “what is this?”
He breathed in through his nose, as if the air in the room had suddenly become too thick for him.
“Permission for discharge,” he said. “The doctor already signed it. I spoke with the administrator yesterday.”
For some reason, the first thing I felt was not joy.
It was fear.
Not fear of leaving, but fear of believing too quickly that I still had somewhere to go.
I looked around the room where I had lived for five years, at the narrow bed, the wardrobe, the faded curtain.
Everything here was not mine, and yet leaving it suddenly felt like stepping from one thin piece of ice onto another.
“Misha,” I whispered, “where would I go?”
He sat down then, finally, but not like a visitor.
He sat like someone who had come to carry part of the world on his shoulders.
“To me,” he said.
The words were simple, almost too simple.
I wanted to smile, but my mouth trembled instead, because simple words can sometimes cut deeper than cruel ones.
“You are eighteen,” I said. “You have your studies. Your life. You cannot arrange your life around an old woman.”
He looked at me, and for a moment I saw the thirteen-year-old boy again, sitting in my kitchen with clenched fists.
“I already arranged it,” he said.
He opened his backpack and took out another folder, then a small notebook, then an envelope with receipts.
There was something almost childish in the way he laid everything out, carefully, straightening each corner with nervous fingers.
“I rented a room,” he said. “Not big. But clean. Near the technical college. First floor, no stairs.”
He swallowed, then added, “There is a little kitchen. The window faces the courtyard. Not like yours, but still.”
I wanted to tell him no.