Nastya, Kiev / Germany

On the afternoon of the 22nd, I finished my work, turned on the series and felt happy. I was worried that everyone was already shouting about the war, but for some reason it seemed that everything would be fine. The salary came, I realized that I have everything, I can travel and enjoy life. On February 23, my friend, who left for Turkey, told me to buy a ticket and go to her.

On the night of the 24th I was very scared. I thought it was because I couldn’t decide whether to go or not. Woke up at 05:07 from distant explosions, grabbed the phone and saw from a friend: “Do you hear?” I ran to my mom, who immediately called my aunt. We began to think what to do. No one thought of leaving.
The first days were terrible, I slept five hours in three days. On the night of the 26th there were street battles in Kiev, we were sitting in a cold and dusty basement without a toilet. I just started my period, I will always remember how I changed the gasket in a dark corner.

I was afraid to wake up and read the news that we had become Russia. That was the scariest thing. The explosions squeezed my chest, and I felt that at some point I would just fall. The following days she gradually returned to normal, calmed down and even got used to it. I know it’s not normal, but at some point I fell into a terrible depressive pit,I even thought of killing myself. At this moment, for the first time, I got sick with the crown, but I realized that I needed to hold on. They didn’t go down to the basement anymore.

I wanted to volunteer, but in the end my family convinced me to go to Germany, where my job called me. We arrived in Lviv, spent a week there, slept on the floor in a cold apartment, were able to take a shower only three days later, but these are all trifles compared to residents of other cities. I also celebrated my birthday there, and a week later we took the bus to Berlin. I was surprised that many people wanted to make money during this period and put such prices on tickets, which did not exist before the war. We hardly found relatively cheap ones.

It’s the first time I’ve come abroad, but there are no sensations at all, I don’t feel anything. Now I try not to think, I just follow others. A friend calls me to Poland. The family wants me to be with them. And I just want to go home. I want to go to my Kiev, where in fact I have always felt good, I just didn’t understand it. I don’t know what to do next, to be honest. My whole well-adjusted life was destroyed in one day, I still want to wake up and realize that it was a long and terrible dream. I look at photos from cities near Kiev, and somewhere inside a black hole is growing more and more. This is a terrible tragedy of all my people, a pain that we need to live with somehow