In the morning, Vladimir Mikhailovich was awakened by something strange. He sat up in bed, stretched with a groan, scratched his protruding belly in his camouflage T-shirt, slipped his feet into his slippers, and walked to the kitchen. Pressing the TV remote and not getting the desired result, he suddenly realized what had woken him up. It wasn't the quiet sound of a car pulling up, nor was it the noisy conversations of young people gathering near his window before heading off to do their business, nor was it the noise from his overly active neighbors upstairs, who were always doing some kind of renovation. It was silence. A deafening, all-consuming silence.
Vladimir Mikhailovich tried to turn on his smartphone to see what time it was, but that didn't work either. The black glass screen of the device only reflected his slightly dissatisfied face. The man cursed and, pulling on a pair of loose shorts, went out into the stairwell. He hesitated at the door to Alexei's apartment. After all, he often annoyed the young man with his eternal lamers' problems. Nevertheless, he rang the doorbell, then tried twice more, but received no answer, not even a sound from the bell. Shrugging his shoulders, Vladimir Mikhailovich went back to his own home, reasonably concluding that it was probably too early in the morning and that the best thing to do was to get some more sleep.
Of course, he didn't know that a couple of days ago Alexei had come home in a deeply depressed state. The guy sat at his work laptop for a long time, trying to distract himself with movies and entertainment shows on cable TV. But his thoughts inevitably returned to the same image that was stuck in his mind.
Disappointed with the media entertainment options, he opened his social media page and again sat for a long time, staring blankly at the field for entering a new post. Several times he reached for the keyboard, but immediately gave up without typing a single character. In the end, he took out a beautifully bound diary, a gift from his colleagues on some holiday or other, which he had never used, and tore out a page.
With a slightly trembling hand, almost unaccustomed to holding a ballpoint pen, the guy hastily wrote a few words. Alexei himself did not know why he did it. Probably because somewhere inside he believed that this was the right thing to do. A tribute to some kind of conventional human tradition, which for some reason he now wanted to observe.
He left the piece of paper on the table, disconnected the charging cable from his laptop, and, standing on a chair, attached it to the bracket holding the LED lamp under the ceiling. Closing his eyes and remembering something again, he hastily put his head in the noose and pushed off with his feet, feeling for a moment how the cord tightened around his neck under his weight.
There was no one left in Alexei's apartment who could read the note he had left behind: "You can't trust anyone. Not even yourself. Especially yourself..."