Here you stand before me in my apartment in Kiev in your best red dress and your best pearl earrings and your best bright makeup, presenting yourself to me, giving to me everything of you that you can, wanting so desperately to find a good man, a good husband. You are so radiant, so honest, so present here with me, and it shakes me to my core.
We were out late last night so I know how tired you are tonight, how completely exhausted you are, how you just traveled all the way across this great city to see me again at this crazy, late hour, how you had to work two jobs today because it is necessary to do so if you are to survive, and how you have to get up early in the morning to do it all again tomorrow.
Yet you never once complain or show how weary you really are. You are remarkable. When I mention this to you, how completely exhausted you must be, you hold your head high, smiling and bright, honest and proud, and you look at me with steady, clear eyes. We are used to it here, you say. All women work two jobs. We have no choice.
What a glorious woman you are! What a magnificent Ukrainian princess! Other men, encountering you, see a girl dressed to party; and they straighten their ties and smooth back their hair, hoping to score, because they think the reason you are so wonderfully arranged is to present the possibility of sex, if they play their cards right.
But yours is not the casual, trifling, hook-up mentality of men and women in the West. It is much more than that for you, and I see the truth in your eyes, I see the real you. This is serious to you, almost-life-and-death serious, as it is for a lot of women in Ukraine.
You are the beauty queen, the queen of beauty, in a land flowing with milk and honey and impossibly beautiful women, but you know that it is just a matter of time before advancing age catches up to you, betrays you, that impetuous, impertinent wave crashing over you, pummeling down upon your striking beauty, the only currency you have ever known, crashing it into the sand, with a new wave of pretty, younger women right behind you, stretching along the shore so far as the eye can see, eroding and smoothing away every trace of what you once were.
You stand before me, knowing that you can’t do it anymore, and I can see that in your smiling eyes. I can’t shake the feeling that you consider me to be your last chance at real happiness before you give up and become some boring, foreign banker’s wife. It takes my breath away, and I so love you, Natalya. Wow, I adore you, girl.
– Zan Perrion