Introduction

My Dear Reader,

The story I am about to tell you is my first literary work. It came into existence in a rather unusual way.

            One day, I had a very strange feeling of a terrible loss. It was as if somebody I loved gradually disappeared from my life. I was in a good mood that day, and I was not sure what could cause that emotion.

Soon afterwards, two people appeared in my consciousness, he and she. His name was Peter; she went without a name. They gradually became my very close friends, and I thought about them all the time. They were very ordinary people living very ordinary lives. They would be very surprised if they learned that I decided to write about them. “Hey Lev”, they would probably tell me, “You might as well write about your neighbors across the street. Chances are their lives are more interesting and eventful than ours”. Yet there was something a little off about them, some minor strangeness, as if a suburban soccer mum gave her daughter as a birthday present a little pet unicorn. As it transpired, he was immortal.

           The consequences of this little oddity were horrible. You will learn about them from my story. I could not bring myself however to write about the worst of them. Most unfortunately,

                    “These people do not exist!”

           There is an ironclad logic in this world, a strict set of requirements that determine who can and who cannot exist. All people who exist must be mortal. Peter is immortal, therefore he doesn’t exist. But she? Why did such a sorry fate befall her? She is just another woman, a face in the crowd. And she is definitely mortal. But I played a nasty trick with her. She appears in my story when she meets Peter at a bus stop. In this cruel world, people who exist can meet only people who also exist. And as soon as one meets a person who doesn’t exist, they lose their right to exist as well.           

            When I realized all this, I was close to desperation. I felt that I failed them, in a worse possible way. The only place where they existed was my head. If I moved to different projects or simply got distracted with a flow of life, I could forget about them and they would cease to exist, at least until I would remember about them again. And just like her, I am mortal, and when I am gone, so will they, and this time forever.

            So I decided to write down their story and try to publish it. I wanted as many people as possible to get to know them and think about them at least once in a while. I hope that this will make the night of nonexistence a little less dark for them, and maybe, just maybe they will come into existence, just a little bit, in some very figurative way.