Just pretend I've written something meaningful and profound to commemorate the four years since the full-scale invasion, because I have nothing new or deep to say.
My hometown has been under occupation since 2014. My parents probably already have russian citizenship, because you can't survive there otherwise. But I don't ask them about it.
The town most dear to my heart is now in ruins, and Ukraine is slowly losing ground there - but, more importantly, lives. So it has become another cemetery, a concrete desert among many others, like I knew it would. The frontline has now reached the little village where I spent the first few years of my life, and which I still see in my dreams sometimes, however fuzzy - a little house on the hill, summer, tall grass (it probably seemed way taller because I was so small), my great grandma and I harvesting berries in a raspberry patch, a tapestry with deer on it in the summer house. None of it exists anymore, or ever will again.
I saw some war footage with russians hiding in a graveyard, probably somewhere in those parts. It could have been one of countless little graveyards, but for some reason, for the first time, I imagined my great-grandma's grave being uprooted by a missile, and that thought made me sick.
Thinking about any of it makes me sick. I don't think I can feel the normal spectrum of human emotions regarding the war anymore. It's either sickness or nothingness.
Living in Donetsk, in 2016 or so, I remember thinking - it'll be over soon, it can't go on much longer. In 2021, I faced the truth - it's not going to end. I need to leave and try to start over, so I did. In 2026, I'm trying not to think about anything. Not to count years. Not to plan. Not to stare too long as elderly mothers bring flowers to the portraits of their fallen sons and wipe stains off their photograph faces. Because thinking about any of it, looking at it, is unbearable, and only gets worse as time goes on.
May russia crumble into a thousand pitiful pieces.
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