A Drone Makes It All the Way to St. Petersburg
My wife’s family called today with worry that the war had made it to them
Yesterday, a close friend still living in St. Petersburg took this photo. She works at Gazprom in the city and while not necessarily a big supporter of Putin, she supported his decision to go to war in 2022. After we argued a few times, I decided to stop pushing it with her. We don’t talk about politics anymore. We just quietly miss each other.
We used to be in love, but we were both with other people. Colleagues, we never even admitted this love to each other, but everyone who saw us together knew this was the case. It was one of those loves that caused a genuine ache in the heart, but neither of us was sure that the other felt the same way, so we stayed with our mates at the time. We both later divorced those partners, and to this day, we have never spoken about those feelings that tortured us from the moment we met in May 2005 until I moved to Moscow for work in 2008.
This picture is of the Fontanka River, the left branch of the city’s main river, the Neva, which crisscrosses the entire city. I have stood on the bridge my friend was on when she took this photograph a thousand times. I have walked on that ice, though, only once or twice. The canals and rivers do freeze, but the ice can…
