No, you don’t get angry at all, you just listen to the sound of a flying plane that carries others to vacation, but in my country it brings death.
A rumble, a station, and I… am no longer at home. Ukraine-Slovakia border. Something flutters inside me and seems to shout with all its might: “I’m alive, at least it was.” My life screams, as does yours and hers. It has stopped, but it wants to live and it is so difficult for it to fight against a body that is just observing. It thinks that perhaps it will be happy in another country. But it doesn’t know yet: a fashionable look or cool sneakers have long ceased to bring joy. At the border, you raise your head and see a helicopter flying from peaceful Slovakia to some other peaceful country. No, you don’t get angry at all, you just listen to the sound of a flying plane that carries others to vacation, but in my country it brings death.
You know, I used to love watching melodramas, so that somewhere at the climax I would definitely cry. Now I should not watch melodramas, and even they cannot be compared to one simple word “Azovstal”. How often have you been simply destroyed by words? Not from beauty, but from pain, unbearable pain that makes you suffer out loud. Odesa, Kremenchuk, Vinnytsia, Kherson – should I continue or are you already “just a body”? I am only 19 years old to be just a body. I want to love, dream, live, not just breathe.
I’ll tell you a secret: sometimes I’m afraid to forget just to breathe. You are empty, but you seem full. Do you know what emptiness is? It’s when you go to your room and fall on the floor. Seems like you`re deafened by the sirens and tears roll down your face from time to time, which you should have cried for some guy. You continue lying on the floor, because you are ashamed even to lie down on the bed. The sun slanted through the window, reflected on the wall. As if it’s saying to me: “Get up, a little more left.” It’s been so many years and it still can’t accept that people can destroy other people too easily. And now I’m sitting in the shopping center and trying to think about something nice, I`m looking at the children playing near the fountain and recalling Mariupol.
Oh, about something nice, not about the pain, Chris! But the child is playing with toys from the “LEGO” series, they are so small and funny, they develop the children’s fine motor skills. Some brave defenders of Mariupol became the prototypes of these little toys. Come on, Chris! Life, I do try….
Translator: Bohdana-Nikolietta Terekhina
