Life Interrupted. Resumed. Ended.

     A human being can get used to literally everything. Low pay. High cholesterol. Frequent hurricanes. Non-freedom of speech. Many people living in North Korea genuinely enjoy their country and would not trade it for Berlin or Miami, even with extra benefits. Someone might object to this assertion, but I believe it is true. Not for everyone, but for some, for sure. Let us take me, for instance, a person from a country at war. For the last two years, I have already gotten used to planning my life and living it in between shelling. I got used to putting my life on pause and resuming it at an all-clear signal.

     Today, at night, we were attacked by shaheed drones. I did not get up. I heard the sound of an air raid siren. It sounded loud behind the windows and hushed in the form of a regular notification on my phone. I noted the threat and got back to sleep. My husband calls us feeble-minded for ignoring the warning and not going to the underground parking to hide, considering that it is located in our residential building, just around the corner. I do not argue with him. It is difficult to dispute the truth. But… as I said, homo insane-iens can get used to literally everything. I did. 

     When the morning came, ignoring reality became a little more complicated because the shaheed drones gave way to missiles of different shapes and content. My husband heard an explosion in the distance, not far away from us. The light, water, and heating went off. We got up. I had a pronounced deja vu feeling. Unlike the latest untypically warm winter days, it got significantly colder outside. There was no one in the street. The skyline was dark. Silence dominated. A few birds soared high up and scared me with their slight resemblance to a deadly missile flying in our direction. It felt like the winter of 2022. Did we pick up our bug-out bags and rush downstairs to hide in the underground parking? No.

     We started circling the apartment. The view from our 15th floor attracted my eyes, and I could not stop visualizing a missile swishing into our window and landing on my bed. I “love” my rich imagination at times. The more news about explosions, damage, and people injured and killed in Kyiv and the region we read, the faster our pace became. The sound of an explosion somewhere closer forced us into the bathroom and even pushed us into the general hall, where we could at least find two concrete walls between our feeble-minded bodies and a highly probable flying death sentence. Yet, we could not stay in one place for a long time. And, no, we still did not go to the parking. I can try to defend myself by saying that fifteen floors down on foot with a heavy bag on my sore back was an insurmountable challenge, but it is not true. Two years ago, we ran not only with heavy bags but with an additional, horror-struck burden sitting quietly in their carriers, our two cats. Now, they were in Kyiv with my husband’s parents. As they later told us, the older cat followed our feeble-minded pattern, slightly turned her head at the sound of the explosion, and went back to sleep, while the younger one rushed under the radiator she had chosen as a shelter long ago. When my mother-in-law described it in fine detail, I could not help but smile at how my furry beauty, the one I often criticized for lacking intellect due to toilet problems, eventually turned out to be smarter than I.

     At some point, I did pack laptops, chargers, my reading glasses, and medication for my back pain into the bug-out bag and hesitantly offered my husband to go to the parking. In ten minutes, the shelling stopped. We got the light, water, and heating back. The world outside unfroze the way artificial snowflakes resume their fall in the plastic snow globe after being shaken. Outside, parents grabbed their children and dragged them for a walk, picked up trash, hurried to the supermarkets, and started the engines of their cars. Life, being interrupted for long hours of horrified anticipation, was resumed. For some. It ended for others. For good.