i think quite often about the implications of shane growing up in nowhere ottawa, a cottage at the edge of the woods, and ilya hailing from the cold, salt-stained streets of moscow. the way those two childhoods never stopped existing inside them. the way they surface in quiet, domestic moments.
shane kills the bugs in their house without thinking. he doesn’t even hesitate. just a folded paper towel, quick and clean. ilya, who flinches at the sound of loons on the lake, watches from a safe distance, faintly horrified. he has never been an exterminator. he has never needed to be.
ilya offers to hire someone to change a lightbulb. to replace a lock. to fix something small and ordinary. shane just blinks at him, slow and confused, because it costs ten dollars at home depot and then you do it yourself, ilya... that’s the whole point. that’s how it’s always been done.
but ilya knows how to endear himself to the local bakery. he leans on the counter, soft voice, easy smile, and every time they leave there is something extra tucked into the brown paper bag. being a millionaire means nothing here. every grandmother pinches his cheek anyway. every owner insists he take more.
he doesn’t need google maps when they drive through the city. he knows instinctively how streets bend, how neighborhoods breathe. he has every app for taxis, deliveries, reservations, tailoring. he knows how to argue, too -- sharp and precise -- when someone tries to take advantage of shane. no, you are not ripping off my husband. no, you will not get away with it (shane's no idiot, but yuna famously handles all his business, simply taking his interests in mind).
(by the same vein) shane, who barely knows how to negotiate a contract because someone else always did it for him (yuna, an agent, etc), knows the sky instead. he knows the constellations. he learned them standing beside his father, neck bent back, the dark stretching endless above them. (he was a boy scout for exactly 1 year before quitting bc it cut into hockey time). sometimes they lie on the patio furniture now, deep in thought, and shane points them out one by one, voice soft with certainty, and ilya listens like he’s being told a story (it reminds him, at first with a shock, of his mother, of bedtime folk stories told once by the first russian mother to the first russian child. of cannabilism and children being stolen by devils in the middle of the night, but it was still funny & sweet anyway, bc irina swore to always protect him before tucking his little toes in)
ilya fills their kitchen with beautiful, lavish, complicated things. heavy clay pots. expensive japanese knives. a coffee machine that hisses and gleams like something alive. the tv room with state of the art speakers & a remote system that takes shane 3 days to figure out how to use. shane brings the deck pillows inside before the first snowfall. he checks the seals on the windows. he knows which mornings the frost will come early.
they are both, in quiet ways, teaching each other how to live.
(and, more quietly still, carrying small, invisible pieces across that shared space between them. ilya learns to rotate his own tires. shane cooks his first stir fry. and what a beautiful thing that is -- for someone to look inside you and, somewhere in the shape of who you’ve become, recognize the person you love most).
it is strange, sometimes, to see the ghosts of who they were before this. the boy in the woods & the boy in the city. all those instincts, all those small private competencies, surviving into this shared space
and maybe that’s what love is. not becoming the same thing, but making room for the person shaped by somewhere completely different. letting their world fold into yours until neither of you is ever alone inside it again.
