That Person Is Gone

I have stopped noticing that I am alert.

Last night I read about a man in Kyiv who almost got hit by a car.

He was walking with his headphones on, and his body leapt out of the way before his mind understood there was a car.

He told he remembered the sound, but not the sight.

There is a Japanese word for what his body did.

Zanshin.

A remaining mind.

A part of us that stays awake even when we think we are not paying attention.

I was reading his story in my kitchen table at 2:17 in the morning.

Less than one kilometer from where it happened.

Then something hit from outside. I couldn’t place it.

I stopped typing. My hands moved on their own toward the keys.

Three seconds.

Then I started again, as if nothing had happened.

If it had been an attack, the apps would have told me already.

But my breath had definitely changed.

I don’t hear sounds the way I used to.

Some of them arrive in my internal panic sensors before they reach my thoughts.

When someone comes to Ukraine for the first time, I write a list for them.

Download the air raid alert apps as soon as you arrive.

Know the nearest two metro stations.

The rule is two walls between you and the outside. Stay away from the balcony and the window.

Some things arrive too fast for you to run…

I wrote a paragraph like this recently, and only after I finished did I realize what it was: a travel advisory.

Something a guidebook would publish.

But it was, in fact, my nervous system speaking.

What my body has compressed into a few lines, so someone I have never met can absorb in one read what took years to absorb without choosing to.

A country put it into me.

It didn’t ask.

The reason I am writing this instead of sleeping is that there is no place where this is counted.

Infrastructure destroyed.

Money committed.

Territory held or lost.

There are numbers for everything else.

What is not counted is what happens to the people who are still here.

Cities can be rebuilt on a timeline.

A nervous system does not have one.

Sometimes we remember our life in the first months after the invasion.

How we used to run to the corridor.

How we used to count the seconds between the alarm and the first explosion.

I remember that person I was with a certain kind of tenderness.

Someone who was still capable of being surprised.

That person is gone.

I did not notice him leaving.

—Viktor

🇺🇦

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