The Thin Blue-Yellow Line Between Love and Hate: A war diary from Ukraine by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

Forget-Me-Nots

At around four in the morning, the sirens started wailing again. I woke up and checked the time on my phone. I saw that Tom had woken up too and got up out of bed, rubbing his eyes sleepily:

“Is it an alarm?”

“It’s okay, little fella, go back to sleep,” I whispered to him, “It’s okay.”

He settled back into his pillow and fell asleep. But I couldn’t get back to sleep even after the siren sounded marking the end of the air raid warning. The adrenaline rush stopped me from dropping off for a long time and then my brain kicked in.

Why four in the morning? This is the time that most experts reckon the new offensive on the Donetsk front will start, everyone has been expecting this for a long time. And precisely on a Monday morning. It’s probably already started. I knew that if I reached out for my phone to check the news, I would definitely not get back to sleep. But second-guessing about it was giving me no peace either and the tense uncertainty was not going to help me get any rest.

I had told my son that everything was okay, but that definitely wasn’t true. Because out there somewhere, in all likelihood a missile has just hit its target. If we weren’t in Lviv but Kharkiv, there’s no way I’d be able to ignore the sirens and simply tell my son to sleep on. We would be running to hide in a basement somewhere by now.

Perhaps there, in the east of the country, shells and rockets are already raining down at the moment, bullets are whistling overhead, thousands of tanks attacking our soldiers’ positions with a roar and blood is being shed. And I had just told my son that everything was fine. And my soul felt thoroughly dirtied as a result of this lie.

Not to mention the fact that we are sleeping here on soft warm pillows while our men are freezing in the trenches waiting for the start of a massive new enemy offensive. Or they may have already taken up their positions and are preparing grenade launchers and anti-tank systems, waiting for the columns of enemy vehicles to come into range.

Sometimes, it seems to me that I have already been at the “acceptance” stage of the Kubler-Ross grief model for an age – I have long ago accepted this war and let it slip into my heart and mind. That I have already accepted its consequences and that our lives will never be the same again. I have accepted all the restrictions that the war places upon us. I have accepted the need to radically change absolutely everything and to live in a totally new way.

But I don’t know if it’s normal that my rage still hasn’t dissipated. Maybe it will forever remain in my heart. Embedded in my DNA. Maybe it has replaced those nucleic chains that were responsible for the ability to forgive.

If we lived in some more modern and technologically

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