Part 3
I am lying in the bed frozen having no idea of how to fall asleep. What if I need to rush to the shelter any minute. I didn’t dress down. I am wearing winter tights and a sweater and I don’t care about the clean bed sheets or inappropriate dressing style. I curled up, it seems that this position protects my body. My cat usually makes itself comfortable this way, and this is not the only thing that unites us now. I am also ‘ready to run’ every moment.
P.S. I will not change my outfit for several days, because it allows me to dress up quickly to get to the shelter.
Like a little child you need some mother care, which provides you with a feeling of safety. The problem is that it’s impossible, and my mother seems to require some care too. A human brain can’t process such an amount of ‘information’, so the fear comes first…
The only thing that in a way helps me to fall asleep is exhaustion. How is it possible to get tired when you do almost nothing? I don’t know.
What is necessary to know about my body is that I am/was a fan of sport. Strength training, a 5-km-run, physical work – that’s what I’ve got accustomed to on a daily basis. My 49-kg body is quite powerful, as powerful as it can be. But this day all cardio exercising comes down to just my heart pumping in my chest. It all the time seems that I am running at a high speed, but actually sitting in “the corridor between two walls’, on the sofa or at the kitchen table.
I wake up early, because of the thuds in the distance. We all wake up early. 3 hours of sleep isn’t bad and I will take it and get used to it later. My grandmother is serving breakfast. A new scary idea comes to my mind – food.
If I don’t go to work, maybe the other essential for a city infrastructure employees don’t go to work to. Food supplies are limited resources. Have you ever imagined a race to grab a loaf of bread or a pack of tea… Later I will even find myself in a line NEXT to the shop listening to thuds and waiting for hours to be allowed to take 1 loaf of bread. (2 hands – 1 product of a kind, you know). But again, today I just started becoming conscious of the idea that I can get hungry and don’t have anything to eat. It’s real. Fortunately, my granny is a very considerate person. She says, look at the packages of buckwheat, pasta, rice… Forget about healthy brandy trendy recipes of fancy breakfasts on Instagram, be happy with a packet of pasta! With dairy products and all foods containing proteins the situation is more controversial. It’s also worth mentioning I haven’t eaten meat and sugar for 2 years. Before. No more. Animal hunger can change your diet.
So, I started consciously eating less driving with the idea that I must preserve for future hungry days. But the problem is that now I am even more hungry than ever before – one more animal instinct, probably. Safe for the future not to die. Some things like keeping on a diet and put any kind of nutrition restrictions can be controlled when everything goes alright, but when the situation is critical itself, there is no willpower anymore.
So, the second day begins with breakfast including the products I haven’t eaten for a long while. It’s also mentally traumatic, but not as traumatic as the war is. You know, it can cure a lot of medical conditions. If you have a thing about nutrition, you can get rid of it just by assessing the range of supplies. One more thing that affects your appetite (and your mood and condition) is the TV in the background. TV is on all the time and it is just the news, the latest, freshest and extremely up-to-date.
About the afternoon we hear truds again and they seem closer. It’s the right time to test the shelter. So, we pack some food, water, wear a few layers of clothing and start moving to the garage to get into the cellar. By the way, we must cross the avenue without traffic lights… We are running (and my grandmother in her late sixties) across the road with huge bags in our hands listening to the sounds of shoots somewhere in the distance. We reach the garage and get into the cellar.
Sitting in the cellar is not such a pleasure as one can imagine. It’s really humid in there, and dark, and even colder than outside in snowy February. As I have already mentioned, I have a cough, so these conditions don’t contribute to quick recovery. My heart is pumping all the time.
This first time we spent about two hours in a cellar. It’s worth mentioning that it doesn’t feel longer than it is. The whole atmosphere makes us a bit sick and sleepy. I don’t want to eat and drink. The shooting isn’t constant. A loud period changed into a quiet one. The problem is that it’s not clear when the quiet period begins. You can wait for 15 minutes of silence, but the 16th minute you can hear missiles and it means you can’t leave your shelter. So, always in doubt. It’s like a computer game, when you are either risky or desparate and tired enough to push the lid away and get upstairs from the cellar. It seems like a computer game, but you can’t save your progress on a level. (sarcastic)
Staying in a cellar in daylight is better than when it is cold and dark at night. The space makes you sleepy, but you can’t fall asleep. You can’t sit comfortably, because it’s a dump cellar for jam jars, not for people. That day we visited this place twice, a small number.
On the other hand, sometimes I catch the feeling that I don’t want to leave the place, that I feel safer inside. Once I got hysterical when my parents decided to get home. I shouted that I wanted to stay there forever.
One more episode from the first days that I remember so clearly. We were moving from the cellar back home. We had to cross the road. Getting to the edge of the garage, we heard a really loud road as a plane was flying over, but there were no planes over us at that moment (planes would come soon, but a bit later). This sound was produced by a column of armoured fighting vehicles passing along the avenue. Like spies in an action movie we got frozen lining along the garage wall. I didn’t breathe… it seemed. Then, we got home… but not for a long time.
