The Light Came From Below

After the drones, a tree gave the day back to me

Last night Kyiv lived through another one.

Explosions, drones, missiles, broken sleep. I have nothing new to add.

There are only so many ways a person can say that Russia tried to kill us again.

So today I want to tell you about a tree.

The middle of the day. The brightest hour of the day. I was lying on a bench in a park with a small pond.

Not really a park, more a large square, one of those open places people pass through without looking.

I was in that strange position of lying and looking up at the trees.

I started doing this after I saw Perfect Days, the Wim Wenders film. If you never saw it, I highly recommend. In it, the main character looks at trees as if the leaves are saying something and he has the patience to listen.

His patience and sensitivity have stayed with me since then.

So I looked. The leaves, the branches, the sky behind them. Thanking life for another day, because in this city no ordinary day is guaranteed.

Then the sun came through the clouds, and from that moment it stopped being the film. It was mine.

The light hit the pond and reflected upward, into the shaded parts of the trunk and the branches. The leaves in the lower part of the tree, those the sun never touched, began to shine from underneath.

The tree had light coming from a place I wasn’t expecting light to come from.

I looked beside me. The water, of course.

The light was reflecting on the water and coming back from the pond.

I was not ready for that spectacle.

That enormous tree above me, that had been covering me the whole time, lit from below by the water.

The green was new and young. Spring leaves, just born, only a few weeks with us, and the reflection moved across them and made them shine with a light from inside.

Then suddenly the wind grew stronger.

The water moved, the reflection broke apart, and the branches shook.

My small miracle was gone.

A reflection on a tree had been mine for a moment, and I had lost it.

That is what a night like that does to you, it makes you grieve a reflection.

And just to make this moment belong completely to Ukraine these days, a buzzing sound suddenly entered this scene.

It was unfamiliar, but close enough to the sound every Ukrainian knows.

Drone.

Death.

I turned my head to the other side, not the pond.

It was just a man cutting grass.

Everyone has a sound like that too. Not a drone, but a door, a car backfiring, a phone too loud, some particular sound that your body answers before you do.

You know the flinch I mean.

I almost laughed. Look how insane we are getting, that a lawnmower can do that to a man lying ridiculously on a bench…

And then the light came back.

Brighter than before.

The wind had almost stopped, the water went calm, and the reflection climbed back into the lower branches and the shaded side of the tree.

I was lucky to be there at the exact moment when the sun found the water, and the water found the tree, and the tree gave me back something I had almost lost during the night.

And so I decided to get up while the spectacle was still at its brightest.

Before the day had time to take it away again.

—Viktor

🇺🇦

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There's no team here. Just me, in Ukraine, four years in. I keep this open to everyone and always will. Paid subscribers are the guardians who keep it that way. Stand with them, or read for free, you belong here either way.

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A Message from the Soviet Union