The offshore waves whispered in a language Natasha could not speak. The rusted “beach chair” she carried was awkward in her grip—its joints clanged faintly with her every step, a dissonance underscoring a moment she did not yet understand. She made her way across the stretch of pale, almost sickly sand that seemed to sink slightly beneath her tread, as though the ground itself wanted to swallow her hesitation.

Igor sat crouched by the waterline several meters away, his shaggy black hair caught in the sigh of the ocean breeze. From a distance, he resembled some forgotten deity—disheveled and discarded by the world. Though Natasha feared his gaze, she clutched the beach chair tighter and approached as if drawn by an invisible hand. Her feet faltered once, then twice, before his bitter laugh split the distance between them.

“So you came,” Igor said without rising. His voice was low, weighted, like the stone he was turning over and over in his calloused palm. “What does it mean to you? Sitting beside me here, with that thing?” He nodded toward the chair, though he refused to meet her eyes.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Natasha managed, though her throat felt dry, the words false. The chair, its bizarre scarcity—an artifact from a shop she’d stumbled upon purely by accident—had become her excuse, her talisman, her reason for venturing out from the nameless void of her apartment. She hated that explanation almost as much as she hated herself. “I just…”

Igor glanced up sharply, cutting off her sentence as though he found the sound of her voice unbearable. Or perhaps it was her indecision. His gray-green eyes, shadowed with labyrinthine thoughts, pinned her in place. “Natasha,” he said slowly, each syllable dragging across layers of introspection, “the chair is ridiculous. Do you understand?” He gestured toward it like it was something grotesque. “But it’s also perfect. You dragged it out here without knowing why, right? Yet here we are. You and I. Profoundly, painfully absurd.”

She forced her gaze downward, tracing the tangled thread of his logic. “You’ve read too much Dostoevsky,” she retorted quietly, but with a wan smile tugging at her lips.

“And you haven’t read enough,” he fired back, that sardonic edge of his splitting open, releasing some private inner storm. “You think that chair—ugly as sin and utterly useless—is just a chair? No. It’s a mirror, Natasha. That’s all anything in this world is. Ugliness reflecting ugliness, scarcity reflecting emptiness. People see a life, but they’re really looking at a void. Frames without portraits.” His voice cracked, softer now. “Have you ever tried being truly honest with yourself?”

A pause stretched between them, vast and unbearable. The quiet raked Natasha’s skin like an accusation. Her knuckles whitened around the dull metallic edge of the chair, and her lips finally parted to speak, but Igor raised a hand, stopping her. “No,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “You haven’t. I can see it.”

The waves crept closer with each indignant declaration, as though the ocean itself shared Igor’s verdict. Natasha felt suddenly small; in the presence of this man, this enigma of ragged edges and unwieldy philosophy, her defenses felt paper-thin. “And what about honesty for you, Igor?” she rasped. The tension in her chest was a storm-cloud, thick with electric charge. “You condemn everyone else’s mirror—but what do you see in yours?”

At this, surprisingly, Igor laughed again. This time it carried a quieter resignation, curling at the edges like an old photo. Without speaking, he stood—tall, gaunt, and somehow void of the weight of his earlier torments. He stepped toward her, and for the first time in years, Natasha saw a flicker of warmth—a fragile bridge—in his expression.

“I’m still looking,” he said at last, voice low. “But maybe…” His eyes moved to the ridiculous “beach chair” she clung to as if her life depended on it. “Maybe you and I can sit in its shadow together for a while.”

Natasha blinked, momentarily stunned, but before her mind could protest, a strange calm washed over her. Despite its uselessness, she unfolded the chair—its joints creaked like a long-forgotten song—and placed it on the sand. Opposite the endless horizon of water and sky, she sat, the quiet harbor of Igor’s company her shelter from questions that no longer needed answering.

For the first time, the world felt not wholly bleak, but beautiful in its imperfection.

柳暗花明，不是吗？