A Hard Morning's Night

I know you’re used to being positive here

No, it wasn’t our street that was completely destroyed. Ours got off with just one burned-out car.

No, it wasn’t our girl who was crushed by a concrete slab. Ours finally fell asleep on a mattress in the hallway, after a horse dose of melatonin.

And it wasn’t our acquaintances who died in the attack on the Cardiology Institute... Kyiv city is large.

I know you’re used to being positive here. The positivity will be next – a little different from what you’re used to, but what can I do?

I’m sitting at a piano concert. It’s mostly epitaphs: today is the anniversary of the mass execution of Jews at Babin Yar. It’s just a coincidence.

The music is loud, broken, modernist: Schoenberg, Bartók, Kurtág. And suddenly, at the end, Satie. The most hashed, most beloved Gnossiennes, proto-ambient classics. But they sound in such a way that my breathing automatically turns into sobbing mode. If this is ‘furniture music’, it’s the furniture that’s been smashed to splinters. You sit on a mountain of these splinters, not even trying to find anything, and you’re glad your family is alive and the walls held up.

I return to my home, where everything is fine, and my breathing is still in sobbing mode. I feel washed by tears I haven’t seen in a long time.

And that’s about positivity.