# Measurement № 24

Александр Александрович Чечитов

Geography teacher Madas Nave has spent his whole life in a small town. His fate is only a reflection of millions of ordinary people like him. On his fiftieth birthday, his tiny world turns into an infinitely huge universe.

As long as I can remember, I have always dreamed of meeting aliens and looking at the endless, shimmering abyss above my head at night. Every random yellow line drawn in the sky by a bright, unlucky meteor near our planet was perceived by me as a secret sign. By the age of fifty, when life looked like a completely understandable and ordinary event, I discovered that I myself was an extraterrestrial being.

I am Madas Nave, a geography teacher at a secondary school. It is more correct to say that he appeared to them up to a certain point, being deceived by a false understanding of the processes of life and death.

The early years of my childhood are erased from my memory by many later events. Lessons in elementary school were given to me with varying success. Sometimes commas, letters, and numbers obeyed, eventually playing a cruel joke with me when I was confident in my knowledge and failed exams and tests one after another. Things were much more complicated with behavior, and my parents often became guests in the director's office. Broken school windows, painted doors, and fights haunted me from year to year. Already at the age of fourteen, I barely forced myself to get up in the morning for lessons and generally denied the need for any kind of education.

There was a year left until the end of school when I changed the direction of my thinking and actions. My main hobby was studying the evidence of the existence of aliens. With the lessons, things got better along the way, probably due to the fact that studying stopped being burdensome as such.

About nine years have passed since graduation. During this period of my life, I managed to graduate from university, where I met my future wife. I have studied a lot of terms and references to the appearance of humanoids. Newspaper clippings and copies of photographs overflowed the drawers of my desk and hung on the walls of the room. Only superficial information. I couldn't find anything concrete proving the existence of aliens. At times I felt like a fool, and yet I invariably returned to my favorite activity. Two big events in my life—a wedding and the birth of two rosy-cheeked daughters—contributed to the final completion of my fascination with aliens. At that time, I could only dream of other worlds and other forms of life. There was little time left, even for reflection, in the bustle of weekdays and short weekends. The whirlpool of life consumed me without a trace.