Many months ago, after a very rough week of bombings I was going through local chats of my hometown where tired and scared people were arguing with each other out of pure exhaustion. Main question you could see them asking in different ways was «Is it going to be this bad forever now?». We’ve had bad bombings before, but not like this and definitely not like right now. Before we used to have 1 or 2 days of quiet in between; they usually happened at night and when they happened in daylight we would joke about our bombing routine being disrupted. But gradually it turned into every type of weapon the whole day every day with breaks lasting hours at maximum instead of days. Air raid used to mean something: you hear an air raid, danger, air raid is over when the danger is over (with the exceptions of very fast weapons like ballistic missiles that we’ve often heard exploding before an air raid could turn on). Now, when air raid is just never-ending, it doesn’t really matter, you can’t be alert the whole day.
And one message in those chats has stuck with me. Some guy said: «We’ve all seen what Russians did to Mariupol, Bakhmut, Huliaipole. Move as far as you can and forget this place like a nightmare».
Forget this place? I couldn’t get this message out of my mind and thought about it while looking at everything as if for the first time, trying on this perspective.
Flowers waiting for spring in front of every apartment building, residents plant them and tend the gardens on their own, just to have a pretty communal yard (explosion). My usual route to school and another one we used to take when we got bored of the main one. My best friend and I have never ran out of topics to discuss while going to the school and back. We stood near her house for so long when going home because we couldn’t stop talking (drone buzzing). This is where my friends and I tried to smoke cigarettes for the first time when we were teenagers and thought that adults are crazy for doing this by choice (drone going down). This is where I almost won an e-book in a quiz many years ago and I still remember the right answers I didn’t give because I was scared to make a mistake (explosion). Books my parents bought me when I was a kid and jokingly asked me not to read them so fast this time (bombs in the air). My childhood plushie I’ve had almost my entire life, can’t imagine it in a different bedroom, he’s a homebody and a proud local (explosion). Pizza place where my friends and I celebrated end of the school year. My dad burned his hand here with a hot plate on my birthday once. The food was good (artillery somewhere far away). Listening to music in the backseat and looking at my favorite view in the entire world. One turn and we’re home (all clear).
Forget this place? This is the only place worth remembering.
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