Personal Reflections on War and Loss

I feel like fucking destroying all those patriots.

They've really gotten on my nerves. Honestly, I moved back to Ukraine to live.

We're from Kherson Oblast, now I have returned with my son to live in

Ivano-Frankivsk

Oblast.

You know,

Well, it's very hard for me to say this now, but it's as if we'll never

understand each other, as if we don't understand each other.

I tell them, I'm from Kherson Oblast, my home is under occupation.

I tell them that my mom is buried under occupation,

and I can't go

to the cemetery, to my own mother's grave,

because it's under occupation, because my home was bombed.

I tell them this,

and they say to me, "Why in Ukrainian?"

I tell them, I listen to the song

"Mother's Eyes" or "Let's Pray for Our Parents."

Or this one, Zivert,

which I listened to eight or nine years ago, when my

mom was still alive.

And I listen to this song. You don't understand, you'll think I'm some kind of freak,

that I'm

somehow wrong, that I'm doing something wrong,

that I'm a lousy patriot, that

I fucking need to leave Ukraine, give up my shitty passport.

Throw away your passport! Just throw it away, fucking tear it up,

burn it.

And what do you say to me? Tear up your passport. What for?

Why? Because I listen to this song and I

remember my mother while she's still alive.

I remember when I lived in my

Kherson, at home,

when I could visit my parents, when I could fucking take eggs out of the

henhouse in the village,

when I remember everything: Tsyurupynsk, Kherson, when I remember my whole

region, all our towns: Zaliznyi Port, Bolshevik, Lazurne.

When I remember that,

and people tell me: you can't listen to music.

What the fuck am I supposed to do, when everything's already been taken from me anyway?

Everything's been taken. Nothing's left. And then I

am being told to erase my memories,

because the music is Russian.

I understand that they, those faggots, attacked us, but how can I erase them when,

fuck, I

have the only thing that can heal me, which is music that I can

listen to, apparently, only in my car. That's how it is.

In an enclosed, enclosed, enclosed space.

A singer I loved, who I listened to with my mom,

when I drove through the

Kherson region.

Wow!

We'll never understand each other in this life, never.

And honestly, from the bottom of my heart, because I live in Ivano-Frankivsk now,

in western

Ukraine, because I moved there, yeah, and I've never had

such a desire for people to feel this.

On the contrary, I wholeheartedly wish, that people would never in their lives

know what it's like when your home has been bombed.

That you had a home, yeah, and now a Russian flag

is hanging there, and you have no home. And God forbid

anyone finds out what it's like when you can't come to

your mother's grave.

God forbid. Fuck.