01/16/2023
The siren has been screaming since 8 am.
"It's loud outside", – Alex tells me. "Air Defense System, I've heard".
I go to the kitchen to make coffee and hear another explosion.
It sounds like a different district of the city. But the city is mine.
Kyiv freezes. It's like an airplane landing – you're not in the sky anymore, but you haven't touched the ground yet. Neither dead nor alive, somewhere in transition.
The subway is crowded with people, dogs, kids drawing coloring pages. Young people with laptops share mobile internet and continue to work. Soldiers and employees of McDonald's, from which we took products for people in shelters in the first week of March. Hundreds and hundreds of people, no signal and no fear.
Kyiv seems to have pumped up its muscles. Me too.
I remember my first night in the subway during spring – people were confused, crying, and so fu***ng lonely. And now these same people know how to fight. It seems that we have always had these muscles, but now they have a shape.
The siren continues, and the Volodymyr Cathedral is surrounded by people in uniform – they are burying a soldier. Trees are planted in the park, where the rocket hit in October. The Christmas tree is decorated with a blue and yellow flag.
Near the subway, there is graffiti in Russian, which has been rewritten in Ukrainian: "Love is the law".
I used to get upset – there is so much war on my Instagram.
Now I'm laughing – there's so much love on my Instagram.
Does the darkness have another antidote?
Explosions in Kyiv on Friday, two weeks before New Year.
End of the air alarm,
we are alive,
with muscles.
#київ
