EVGENY NOVIK
The Things We Leave Burning
Hello. I’m sharing something new tonight. I don’t know if it belongs here, in this place of shadows and ink, but I love it anyway. It’s a character study of my main OC. He is me (or the pieces of me I don’t always show). I’d like you to know him.
Spanish version →
💬 0 🔁 0 ❤️ 0 · EVGENY NOVIK · Las cosas que dejamos ardiendo ✨Versión en español de mi character study sobre Evgeny Novik✨ English ver
The Things We Leave Burning
There are people who walk into a room and make everything seem a little quieter.
Evgeny does the opposite.
He walks in, and something catches fire.
Sometimes it’s the stage, sometimes a wall covered in posters, sometimes a song, sometimes simply the patience of someone who would rather not hear what he has to say.
He is twenty-four years old, born in Minsk, and for several years now he hasn’t had a home he could point to on a map. He grew up among squats in Berlin, half-dead theaters, borrowed rooms, and places where there was always someone willing to give him a couch, a stage, or a wall that hadn’t been covered in paint yet.
He says he lives wherever people let him perform and wherever he finds people who think like him.
And maybe that’s true.
Maybe it’s also an elegant way of saying that he still hasn’t found a place he can call his own.
But Evy — because almost nobody calls him Evgeny — seems to have learned to make homes out of other things.
A song.
A protest.
A stage.
A person.
A seed.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
He is tall and slender, somewhere between 1.75 and 1.80 meters, although onstage he seems much larger.
His skin is almost porcelain, too pale to hide the small traces the cold leaves behind: pink knuckles, lips that are always slightly flushed, cheeks that color easily. He is covered in freckles, as if someone had splashed ink across his skin and then decided to leave it there.
His jaw and cheekbones are defined, but his face never quite becomes harsh.
That is the first thing that deceives you about him.
He can look serious until he opens his mouth.
Then the rest appears.
The unexpected sweetness.
The crooked smile.
The exaggerated way he speaks, moving his hands as if even an ordinary conversation needs choreography.
He has a sharp nose, though far from perfect, full lips with the lower one slightly fuller than the upper, and thick eyebrows that share the same pale blond color as his hair.
And his eyes.
Sky blue.
But not entirely.
Tiny flecks of pale green hide within the sea of his irises, a partial heterochromia that makes his eyes seem to change depending on the light. They are bright, expressive, and difficult to ignore.
They narrow when he smiles.
Perhaps that is why his gaze becomes more dangerous when he stops.
His hair is light blond, slightly darker at the roots, completely natural, and curled in an imperfect way: not quite defined curls, but strong waves that fall to his shoulders.
He usually wears it loose.
Onstage, he doesn’t.
Onstage, he turns it into something else.
Gel.
Spikes.
Chaos.
Like almost everything else.
He keeps his nails long because he plays instruments, and always leaves them natural. His hands usually have little smudges of paint on them and are covered in rings. He has two nostril piercings joined by a small chain that crosses over his nose, and two ring piercings on his lower lip.
A snake tattoo begins at his shoulder and winds around his neck as if it were trying to strangle him.
I don’t know if that is accidentally appropriate.
Probably not.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
Evy uses his body the way he uses everything else:
as a statement.
He can walk onto a stage shirtless.
He can appear covered in glitter.
He can wear a tuxedo covered in torn sequins, a white shirt full of holes, combat boots, harnesses, and band pins.
Rotten elegance.
That is probably the only way he would describe it.
He has no interest in being pleasant.
He doesn’t want his body to be a surface for other people’s approval.
He wants to turn it into art.
Into protest.
Into something that makes people uncomfortable.
Because for Evy, discomfort is not an accident.
It is part of the job.
“If I don’t make people uncomfortable, I’m not doing my job.”
And perhaps that is one of the best ways to understand him.
Because Evgeny wasn’t simply born punk.
There was no specific tragedy that split him in two.
There was no night when he woke up and decided he would become an activist, an artist, and a creature of the night at the Kit Kat Club.
He built himself slowly.
Little by little.
A decision.
A protest.
A song.
A person.
A disappointment.
A night that lasted too long.
An empty wall.
Another.
And another.
Until one day he realized he no longer knew who he was without all of it.
And he didn’t want to know.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
He can be the idiot putting up posters at two in the morning.
The one who shows up at a march.
The one carrying tape, markers, and NO PLANET B stickers in a battered backpack.
The one who sees an empty wall and thinks it is an opportunity to say something.
Some nights, he becomes another creature.
Onstage, he is seductive, cruel, funny.
He hugs someone and insults them in the same sentence.
He crawls out from the audience with his face painted black and white, like a clown who has been crying glitter for far too long.
He whispers:
“I’m not for everyone.”
And then he gets up.
Suddenly, he takes up the entire stage.
His voice is melodic, slightly deep, gentle even when he says things that should sound like threats.
Between songs, he can stop everything to talk about a protest.
About a forest.
About someone being ignored.
“While you’re applauding, they’re cutting down the last forest outside. Applaud louder.”
And then he goes back to singing, acting, screaming.
Because that is Evy’s fundamental contradiction:
He doesn’t believe art is enough.
But he also doesn’t know how to live without it.
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“I’m not an artist.”
He says it with absolute conviction.
“I’m someone who uses art because otherwise I’d go insane.”
And maybe that’s true.
He doesn’t create because he wants to decorate the world.
He creates because he needs to transform it before the world finishes destroying him.
His activism doesn’t come only from anger, either.
It comes from care.
That is something very few people probably understand about him.
Evy can scream.
He can insult.
He can be unbearable.
He has an almost artistic ability to find exactly the thing that will make people uncomfortable.
But underneath all of that is someone who cares deeply.
About the planet.
About people.
About those who have no stage.
About those who live on the streets.
About those who are pushed out of the places where they should be allowed to exist.
And also about himself.
Even if admitting it is difficult.
Because there is an idea that follows him everywhere:
that he is running out of time.
Not necessarily time to die.
Time to do something that matters.
He is afraid that one day he will reach the end of his life and realize that all that noise meant nothing.
That he ran through the streets.
That he screamed.
That he danced.
That he sang.
That he covered walls.
That he provoked.
And that, somehow, he still left nothing behind.
The irony is that he already has.
He simply doesn’t know how to see it.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
When no one is watching, Evy turns the volume down.
He reads.
He writes.
He fills black notebooks with lyrics, ideas for posters, and thoughts he will probably cross out later.
He allows himself to be sad.
He doesn’t always do anything with that sadness.
Sometimes he simply lets it exist.
Perhaps that is one of the few things being goth really taught him:
that being sad doesn’t mean being broken.
There are nights when he listens to Aurora at full volume because he can’t sleep.
He likes her music for the same reason he likes songs that speak about the earth, humanity, and everything we are destroying.
The Seed speaks to him in a particular way.
Because Evy believes in seeds too.
In planting something even if you won’t be there to watch it grow.
In doing something even when you cannot control its outcome.
In leaving a small possibility of a future in the hands of someone you may never meet.
That is why he wears one around his neck.
A real seed.
Turned into a pendant.
It came from a tree that once stood in a small square.
The square where he used to meet someone.
The tree was cut down to build a parking lot.
Evy saved a seed before they tore it down.
He turned it into a necklace.
“So I don’t forget why I scream.”
And perhaps that sentence explains more about him than all his protests ever could.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
There was someone before the noise.
Owen.
French by birth, moved to Belarus when he was twelve.
Black hair.
Olive-green eyes.
The same age as Evy.
Almost the same height.
And a patience that, in retrospect, Evy probably never knew what to do with.
Owen was quiet.
He read.
He grew tomatoes on his balcony.
He didn’t need to turn every emotion into a revolution.
And yet he never asked Evy to stop being who he was.
He stayed beside him.
He patched up his bruises after protests.
He made him tea.
He didn’t ask questions.
He simply stayed.
And perhaps that was exactly the problem.
Evy loved him.
Very much.
And he was afraid.
He thought that if he stayed, he would eventually drag Owen into his chaos.
He thought he would break him.
So he did what he knew best:
he left first.
Before Owen could leave him.
For years, he convinced himself that what he had done was a form of love.
Maybe it was.
But it was also fear.
And now Evy knows the difference.
That is something he couldn’t do before.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
Recently, he wrote to him again.
To the same number.
After all those years.
Owen had never changed it.
There was no grand declaration.
No perfect scene.
Just a message.
And a reply.
After that, Owen went to see him at the theater.
He wanted to see Evy in his element.
Not the boy he had known.
Not a domesticated version.
Evgeny.
The one who walks onto a stage with his face painted, combat boots on, and the whole world between his teeth.
And he brought hot tea.
Because some things survive time in strange ways.
Sometimes they don’t survive as photographs.
Sometimes they survive as the exact memory of what drink to give someone when they’re cold.
Evy is still afraid.
But this time, he didn’t run.
Maybe that is what growing up means.
Not losing your fear.
Learning to stay while you have it.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
Owen wants him back.
Evy wants him back too.
But neither of them is exactly the boy they knew years ago.
And perhaps that is the most beautiful part.
They are not trying to recover the past.
They are trying to discover whether something new can exist among its ruins.
Owen doesn’t need Evy to stop being himself.
He doesn’t need him to abandon the stage.
He doesn’t need to turn him into someone easier.
And Evy, for the first time, seems to be learning that loving someone doesn’t necessarily mean destroying them.
Sometimes it means staying.
Sometimes it means asking if they’re okay.
Sometimes it means making tea.
Sometimes it means accepting a “I can’t” without running away.
And maybe, if Owen tells him “let’s go” again, Evy will.
Not because he needs to escape.
But because this time, he would be choosing to stay with someone.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
His bag looks like an extension of his mind.
A battered black backpack covered in pins.
A lighter without a lid.
A notebook with pages torn out.
A chewed-up pencil.
Tape for posters.
Black markers.
Stickers.
A bottle of water because protesting makes you thirsty.
Broken headphones that only work on one side.
A small metal tin with painkillers and a little glitter.
An old photograph he never shows anyone.
Rolling papers for his cigarettes.
And the seed pendant.
He doesn’t carry much money.
He doesn’t carry keys.
He doesn’t have a permanent home that needs opening.
He carries useful things.
Tools.
Things to create with.
Things to resist with.
Things that remind him who he is when he gets lost.
“I don’t carry much money. I carry useful things.”
Perhaps that is another way to define him.
Evy doesn’t collect things.
He collects possibilities.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
He has dreams, even if he says he doesn’t.
He wants a theater.
Not an elegant one.
Not one where important people can feel important.
He wants a place where people no one else hires can take the stage.
Displaced people.
People from the streets.
People who were considered too strange, too poor, too uncomfortable, too much of something.
He wants them to make art there.
And then go out together and cover the city in posters.
He wants to plant something.
Something that lasts.
He wants to be useful.
And perhaps his biggest dream is also the simplest:
to wake up one day without feeling like he has to fight for the right to exist.
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
Evgeny is not perfect.
He is far from it.
He can be impulsive.
He can be exhausting.
He can be selfish.
He can mistake destruction for freedom.
He can hurt the people he is trying to protect.
He can spend so much time thinking about everything he hasn’t done that he forgets to look at everything he has already left behind.
And that is what I love most about him.
I don’t want to turn him into a hero.
I don’t want him to be admirable all the time.
I want him to be human.
Because beneath the smudged makeup, the torn sequins, the cigarettes, the posters, the glitter, and that desperate need to make noise, there is someone who is afraid.
Afraid he hasn’t done enough.
Afraid he hasn’t been enough.
Afraid that when everything finally goes quiet, no one will remember he was there.
But Evy still doesn’t understand something.
Maybe it isn’t about leaving behind a masterpiece.
Maybe it is about leaving behind small things.
A song someone listened to when they needed company.
A poster that made someone stop.
A protest someone dared to attend because they saw him screaming first.
A stage where someone was allowed to be who they were.
A seed.
A tree that doesn’t exist yet.
A person who, years later, still remembers how he took his tea.
Evy believes the world is ending.
So he dances on top of it.
I think perhaps he still doesn’t understand that some things survive the fire.
Seeds.
Songs.
Memories.
People.
And him.
Evgeny Novik doesn’t know how to save the world.
He probably doesn’t know how to save himself either.
But he does what he knows best.
He provokes it.
He makes it uncomfortable.
He fills it with noise.
He forces it to look.
He sets it on fire.
Not because he wants to watch it die.
But because he wants someone, among all those flames, to find a reason to stay.
And perhaps that is the smallest and most stubborn revolution of all:
to keep planting things in a world that insists on burning.
Spanish version →
💬 0 🔁 0 ❤️ 0 · EVGENY NOVIK · Las cosas que dejamos ardiendo ✨Versión en español de mi character study sobre Evgeny Novik✨ English ver
