This is what happened:

I wrote her an email two weeks ago and carefully loaded it with an emotion word or two near the end (the ludicrous games I play) and waited for a while and got an email back of the strictly friend variety; warm, interested, detached, nothing more. An easy enough message to understand, really. I was a little low after that - not much else going on at the moment, essay boredom and all - and so I moped for a little while, making myself a little wallow of self-pity.

And then it happened, just like that.

I remember when I was at a fair, as a kid. Strangely, the specifics don't seem to matter - it's a generic, timeless memory. I remember this: the feel of my sugar-sticky hands enclosing the string of a helium balloon, and I was holding it tightly because I could feel a faint tugging, its longing to be away. Every other kid had a balloon and we all held them tightly as we walked and gawked. Just before the end of the day, I lost concentration - just for a flash, staring at a magic fairyfloss machine - and the string slipped out of my grasp and the balloon slipped upwards, performing little jigs in this breeze and that and I nearly cried, watching that balloon turn into a tiny speck, and every child around me craned their necks with me and we stood and squinted until the dot became the sky and the cloud and the flock of birds.

Yes, the analogy is brazenly, utterly cliched, but it felt exactly like that. I was riding to uni on an undistinguished day when I became aware that I'd left something behind me. It was one of those moments where you aren't quite sure when it was that something changed; you know it may have been a second ago, or it may have been two weeks. But you know that something has changed - you notice this first as a suspicion that the world has quietly altered, and then it dawns that it was you.

This time I didn't watch it flee.

When English speakers use 'melancholy' they intend it to mean slightly sad, autumn-moody, introspective, listing to one side (or at least I do). I've heard that the Russian equivalent is more ambivalent, more nuanced: lilting sadness, I think it translates to, the sweetbitter-bittersweet taste that time leaves in your mouth on a Monday when balloons merge with the sky.