War changes your understanding of what is real and what is not. What you have always considered impossible is real. Missiles hitting shopping malls with hundreds of people inside them (Kremenchuk); shelling of the railway station when dozens of passengers are waiting for their train (Kramatorsk); people murdered in basements after inhuman tortures (Bucha); keeping people in one basement like in a freight car for weeks (Yahidne); destruction of cities; and mass graves where thousands of people are buried (Mariupol) — just a few years ago, we thought all of those things were impossible. We considered the arrival of another Holocaust or Holodomor impossible. Now all of it exists; all of it is ruthlessly real. And it negates all our previous ideas of what’s possible.

The residents of Chernihiv describe how their city was living during the heaviest shelling. Money lost all meaning. People quickly switched to exchange, primordial exchange, when the most surprising things — for example, cigarettes — turned into currency. Or food — war gives you no choice. At some point, you can find yourself in a situation when all you can eat is chicken brought by volunteers. Or shrimp still left at the supermarkets. There is nothing but shrimp. Shrimp is the only accessible reality.

War amputates reality very fast. It takes away many of its numerous colors. Usual things become inaccessible. When Mariupol was left without water, people melted snow still lying in the city in early March. The cold made their nights unbearable, as the heat was cut off, but at the same time, it gave them more chances to survive since they could change snow into water. It is a much more awesome miracle than changing water into wine.

During the war, reality shrinks, so you can see only a small fragment lit by the beams of the spotlight of your wounded conscience. It snatches this fragment amongst all the rest, like a beam of light on Baroque paintings. You can see only what that divine beam is pointing at. The vast reality you were used to in peaceful times no longer exists. The space of countries, seas, and continents is replaced with the space of exact coordinates. Reality becomes meager — but also sharp. You can cut yourself on it. It causes wounds.

Here, reality pricks, cuts, explodes, shoots, and pierces. There is only one way out of reality like this — to hell or heaven.

Author: Volodymyr Yermolenko, Ukrainian philosopher, writer, translator

Translator: Hanna Leliv

Illustrator: Nastia Haidaienko

Content Editor: Maryna Korchaka

Program Directors: Julia Ovcharenko and Demyan Om Dyakiv Slavitski