I never thought that I would ever need my life, that I would describe what I had experienced and seen. Although most writers do just that. My life seemed uninteresting, uneventful, empty, monotonous to me... The same goes for work, despite the fact that I was a journalist, and therefore, all the time - near and among people. Perhaps, unlike others, I was too critical or too demanding about what I had experienced, if I did not see anything worth retelling or recording in it... And today life convinces me that this is not so. After all, along with my young years, an entire era with its symbols, values, requirements, characteristics, heroes, principles, criteria, etc. disappeared into oblivion. I worked in a newspaper. I was a correspondent and a special correspondent. First, in the department of agriculture, then - party life (the CPSU, of course), I was "led" by the Komsomol. But where is that collective farm village today, where are those parties with the Komsomol, about which I had to write and whose insides I experienced, to put it modestly, perfectly? Is it worth talking about them seriously today? No. And frivolously, sarcastically, mockingly - all the more so. About the dead, either good or nothing, - remember? And so I was left, as it were, with memories and at the same time - without them. Probably, like most of my peers who caught the death of the empire. And yet I return to my past. Why? Perhaps, because I regret the years of life that were conditionally lost and I want to somehow convince myself that they are not completely lost, that they - look! - were needed and resulted in something.