After a weak anaesthetic of fitful sleep, the nightmare returns every morning at the press of a DAB radio button. Something deep inside me resists, for it is probably better not to be aware of the dreadful reality that appeared entirely impossible only a couple weeks ago. But not knowing would mean guessing and wondering who else of my friends could have been killed, what other relic of my past had been bombed out of existence, what other blood-oozing morsels had been torn out of Ukraine’s tired heart? And of my own heart too.
“Kharkiv is no more,” an old friend muttered into her phone, having peeped one morning out of the basement where she had been hiding with her husband for over a week. And my exhausted brain immediately made a terrifying connection: “Kharkiv, no more – my birthplace, no more – my childhood, no more – myself, no more...” A shortcut to deep depression, caused by the sheer inability to change the tragic course of events.
I look at the...