A post about love ❤️. Yulia and I had our 20th wedding anniversary on August 26, but I’m actually glad I missed it, because I can write this today, knowing a little more about love than I did a month ago. You’ve seen this a hundred times in movies and read about it in books, of course: one loving person lies in a coma, and the other brings them back to life through love and constant care. That’s what we did too, naturally. Following the rules of classic films about love and comas. I slept and slept and slept. Yulia @yulia_navalnaya came to see me, talked to me, sang songs to me, played music. I won’t lie—I don’t remember any of it. But I can tell you what I do remember for certain. Or rather, it can hardly be called a “memory”; it’s more like a cluster of my very first sensations and emotions. Still, it was so important to me that it is etched in my mind forever. I’m lying there. I’ve already been brought out of the coma, but I don’t recognize anyone, I don’t understand what’s happening. I can’t speak, and I don’t even know what speaking is. And all I do is wait for Her to come. Who she is is unclear. What she looks like, I don’t know either. Even if I manage to make something out through my blurred vision, I’m simply unable to retain the image. But She is different—I understand that much—so I lie there waiting for her all the time. She comes in and becomes the most important person in the room. She adjusts my pillow in exactly the right way. She doesn’t have that quiet, sympathetic tone. She speaks cheerfully and laughs. She tells me things. When she is there, the stupid hallucinations recede. It feels very good with her there. Then she leaves, I feel sad, and I start waiting for her again. I don’t doubt for a second that there is a scientific explanation for this. Something like: I recognized the timbre of my wife’s voice, my brain released dopamine, and I felt better. Every visit was literally therapeutic, and the anticipation itself intensified the dopamine reward. But no matter how great the scientific and medical explanation may sound, now I know for certain from my own experience: love heals and brings you back to life. Yulia, you saved me, and they should put that in neuroscience textbooks 😍