my sisters and i are the same ages as anastasia, olga, and tatania when they were murdered.
where i am, right now, is all of the life that she ever got to experience. (happy belated birthday, nastya)
and i wonder. i think about where i am, what i've done, what my world looks like and how it would compare to her own worldview. i think, sometimes, we infantalize the romanov girls because their portraits are of a version of themselves younger than when they died (most noticeable for anastasia), and because OTM-A were all documented to be exactly what they were bred for, to be aristocratic socialites
my sisters are two of the most intelligent people i know i think about what life would be like if my sisters and i didn't regularly talk about world politics, because that is so different from their experience. they were not politicians, and were shielded from much of what was going on in the world and their own country.
they had security in a world where so many didn't. i'm lucky enough to say the same thing of myself. i think back to quarantine, living with my family, all 6 of us and our dog to boot, and wonder if that's at all a resemblance of their final months. stuck, together. did the girls have much to say about the labor? they were privileged, but were they snobby? snooty?
i don't want to live in a world where i have to know that otmaa watched their parents get murdered before their eyes. that is worse than death. i don't want to think about if it was my family, if it was me, stuck in a basement and they start killing us. my fear is not for myself, it's for them, because i don't want to think about my sisters hurt or attacked, i don't want to think about their screams.
but that was the reality. that happened. it's so easy to say the romanov execution and list off the details without thinking about the gravity. it's easier than sitting back and thinking about it.
i'm 17. i feel old, sure, but i know how much life is ahead and i can't imagine it stopping that abruptly. she was so young. they were all so young. nastya would have been, in todays terms, in her final years of secondary school, entering senior year. we say, anastasia romanov was murdered. we see, in headlines, high school girl murdered, and it hurts. it hurts and it has always happened like this, it has always been like this.
my mind keeps going back to the image of having to watch my sisters be hurt. of them having to watch me. of trying to protect each other and sharing what is simultaneously the worst and final experience of our lives. listening to it when they couldn't move anymore. not having the comfort of a final embrace because you don't even know where the others are in the room.
in anastasia's case: probably realizing you were the only one left. living with that in the leadup to your death, that you outlived them all.
and what about alexei? can you honestly, look me in the face and tell me you wouldn't be horrified if you watched someone stab your 12 year old brother to death, in front of you? your baby. that's your baby. do you ever realize that you were so much smaller than you thought you were? do you ever vividly remember what it was like to be 12? can you go talk to a middle schooler and not be completely reminded of the fact that 12 is only 3 years away from 9?
i see so many similarities in myself and anastasia. but i'm just a girl (genderneutral.)
she was just. a girl.
