“Have you been able to turn it [the war] off in your mind?”

One of my readers asked, in response to one of my very light-hearted stories. No link to the story — so light-hearted it was. Light-hearted in a bad way. I don’t think the question intended to make me feel guilty but it did. I didn’t pull my hair but I asked myself — all that shock, anger, and pain about Russia’s aggression — is it gone indeed?

No.

My Mom keeps sending dozens of messages every day. “It’s impossible to watch,” she writes forwarding me another video of Ukraine’s suffering. A child dead, a child suffering. “How does this beast ever sleep”, she asks.

“He sleeps fine,” I answer.

I’ve watched a number of documents about serial killers. There is one common trait — no empathy, no remorse. When they try to express remorse, it’s always manipulation. It’s lies.

I’ve completely written Russia off. In recent years, before the war and after, there were rare moments when I thought — there will be a day when I’ll visit my home country and it will be a beautiful day. Maybe it will take decades but one day I will visit Russia and it will be a free country. Free of its fascist past, its atrocities, and its streak of empowering senseless serial murderers.

No, fuck it, fuck these romantic, this nostalgia. Not that I’m nostalgic, but I remember the nineties — no doubt a very dark and disorderly decade in Russia’s history but there was freedom. I was a teenager, loving my home country. I…