Dream killer

Even ten years later, Maxim Golikov could not remember how he managed to get out of the mental hospital. The black spot in his personal calendar extends from the confusion and apathy of the late nineties to the eighth year of the new century, pretty much sprinkling many more pages, but he just regrets the least. Everything that happened before is a dotted line, the strokes of which mark important or rather worthless events and are interspersed with voids lasting from several minutes to several days. But this is only approximately, because, trying to remember what was lost, he can only judge about time periods indirectly, and hears about what happened to him from hearsay. In any case, he found himself at liberty, never relieved of the constant sense of danger. The only thing that saves from the final paranoid starvation is that all his old, real, pre-hospital, life stolen by someone has long become for him a shadow on the glass: he peers at this shadow, with a distinct chill realizing that the shadow does not belong to him, and at the same time, she cannot see whose it is: whether it is a person who is trying to look from the darkness outside to the lighted house and probably return home; whether it is the shadow of a vagabond, forever deprived of home, peace and even the memory of the best days, who have strayed in vain attempts to cut off the journey, which the enemy does not wish.