Sunshine Through a Screen

The revelation about Lyosha and Sima's tender, furious response created a new level of intimacy between them. They were no longer just fandom friends, but accomplices in something personal, painful, important. This closeness was warm, but also unsettling. Kristina began catching herself having strange thoughts. She anticipated Sima's messages with greater impatience than she'd ever felt for Lyosha. Her heart beat faster when "Sunshine" appeared in the chat. She reread Sima's long emails, absorbing not just the meaning but the rhythm, the intonation, trying to guess the mood behind every pause. And it scared her. Because this feeling was familiar. Hazy, long-ago, but familiar. Darya came to mind. Sixteen years old, a summer camp for "people like them," boring rehabilitation lectures and endless evenings on the porch. Darya with a bold smile and the same slight awkwardness in her movements. Their friendship flared instantly, spilling over into long talks, touches—to hands, to hair, into clumsy kisses in the dark when everyone was asleep. Kristina thought then that she'd found her universe. That this was *the* love written about in books—forbidden, complicated, but her own. Then camp ended. Back in the city, Darya met her once, then said with a light, apologetic smirk, "Listen, that was all so… summery. Teenage stuff. Don't dwell on it." And vanished into her regular life, leaving Kristina with a tangle of unspoken words and the feeling she'd been misunderstood again. Or understood, but feared. Now that old, scarred-over feeling stirred again. But it wasn't directed at a concrete girl beside her, but at a voice in her earphones, text on a screen, a soul locked hundreds of kilometers away in a helpless body. That was even scarier. Because it was utterly unrealizable and therefore—purer, sharper, like an unembodied idea. She hesitated for a long time. Then decided. Not as a confession, but as a probe. To test the waters. The conversation turned to a new show with an LGBT character. > **Kristina (voice message, trying to speak evenly):** By the way, I… I'm bi. Bisexual, I mean. Hardly anyone knows. Well, except that one girl at sixteen, which didn't work out. Just… so you know. A pause. Not long, but palpable. Instead of the usual heart emoji or a quick reply, three typing dots appeared. Then they vanished. Then text. No "sunshine." > **Sima:** Oh. I see. > **Sima:** I… I'm not against it, of course. That's normal. Everyone has the right to love who they want. > **Kristina:** Yeah, I know you're not against it. Just said. > **Sima:** It's just that I… I'm not like that. I only like boys. Well, in theory. So far just Michael, haha. *winking-smirking emoji* > **Sima:** But that's not a problem, right? It doesn't change anything between us? In these lines, in that hasty qualifier "in theory," in that nervous "haha" and the direct question, there was a slight panic. The same panic Kristina remembered from herself at sixteen, when she was afraid her feelings would make her weird, would push others away. Or worse, would be misunderstood. Sima, so brave in her fantasies, even the dark, explicit ones, turned out to be… an ordinary seventeen-year-old girl from a backwater village when it came to questions of identity. There, the word "bisexual" had probably never been spoken. A sharp pang of pity shot through Kristina. Not for Sima, but for the situation. For this awkward gap between them. She hadn't wanted to frighten; she'd wanted to get closer, to share a part of herself. Instead, she'd drawn an invisible string that now vibrated with tension. > **Kristina (text, gently):** Of course it doesn't change anything, silly. I'm not in love with *you*. *winky face* I just said it as a fact. Like having brown eyes and CP. A part of me. That's all. > **Sima:** Ah… right. Of course. Sorry, I just… didn't expect it. > **Kristina:** It's fine. Really. Let's get back to our plan to kidnap Michael. What color do you think we should paint the walls in the bathhouse where we'll keep him? The subject was forcibly changed. Sima seized it with relief, sending a bunch of laughing stickers and musings about "dark blue to blend with the night." The conversation moved on, but with a barely detectable caution. The overly personal, almost intimate phrasing disappeared. The random "love you's" (which before could have meant anything) vanished. Polite, slightly distant tenderness returned. Kristina closed her laptop and sat in the dark for a long time. She felt like an idiot. Why had she said it? To what end? For Sima to suddenly reply, "Oh, what a coincidence, me too!"? That would have been a miracle of fanfiction proportions. Reality turned out to be more prosaic and sadder. She wasn't in love with Sima. Not exactly. She was in love with the closeness they'd created. With being seen and understood. And she wanted that closeness to be all-encompassing, to include everything. Even this hidden part of her—the one that had once been burned by the words "teenage stuff." But Sima was frightened. Not of homophobia, no. She was frightened of… complexity. The possibility that their perfect, clean world of fantasies and support might suddenly become something too real, too adult, too incomprehensible. With her childlike, stalled-at-fourteen infatuation with an unattainable musician, she wasn't ready for anything else. "I only like boys. In theory." That phrase echoed in Kristina's ears. *In theory.* Sima's whole life was theory. Love, sex, friendship, education—all hypothetical, existing in texts, films, dreams. And Kristina had brought a piece of her own raw, imperfect, sometimes clumsy practice into this theory. And the theory had cracked. Kristina sighed. Nothing had changed, and everything had changed. They would remain friends. Sunshines. But an invisible boundary had been drawn. A boundary between someone who had tried to live—however poorly, however painfully—and someone for whom life was a beautiful, terrifying, infinitely distant fairy tale told in the evenings. And Kristina realized that her role was to be the storyteller of that tale, not to try and drag the princess into her own, not-so-fairy-tale world.