A light green tourist tent for three people has been put up at the subway station. Small groups of people, walking back and forth along the platform, pass it by like a river passing a rock. Only two persons live in this tent: a mother and a daughter. I have never seen a father with them. I do not want to ask where he is.

I have not asked about it even once.

But I do know that this tent used to travel to the mountains, and three people slept inside it. A little girl, Marichka, is still at that age when sleeping in a tent at the subway station is an incredible adventure, and strangers around her automatically become its participants. Marichka happily tells me how she spent the night in this tent with her parents up the mountain - she forgot the name of that mountain, but it was high, and they heard bats flying at night. The mother tells her that her father will soon return and join them, and they'll stay in the tent together again. The sounds at the subway station are different - no bats flying. But it's still fascinating

The mother tells Marichka again and again that her father will be back soon - she tells it every day. I can't bear listening to it any longer, but the little girl wants her mum to repeat this over and over. I try to find another spot farther away from them, but the station is packed, and I give up, unable to squeeze my sleeping pad and sleeping bag anywhere else.

People scurry past me to get hot tea. The subway has turned into a vast underground country where each station is like a separate town with its residents, but the roads between them are blocked, and there's no train connection. In the early days of the big war, you only have so many options. An apartment, a basement, a subway station, an evacuation train - with the sounds of explosions farther away or closer, as luck will have it.

The agitated brain wants to identify every suspicious sound. We cannot leave the subway while the air raid alarm is on. Many people sleep here. I have an irrational desire to climb closer to the surface and listen to what is going on there - even though I have already heard the explosions in the morning. Underground, the feeling of safety is accompanied by an inconspicuous sense of humiliation: the Russian army forces us to go down here, and it does not even have to enter the city. But our desire to survive is strong enough to shelter from missile attacks, huddling together with strangers on the platform or sitting in a light green tent or under the blanket on a train seat. It’s cramped here because there are many of us, and this desire to survive takes up too much space in the underground world. It is clear that everyone has this desire, but not everyone will survive the war.

I open my laptop and connect to the Internet through my cell phone. It's irrational, yet I have to keep busy, pretending that I'm not just sitting underground - I've got things to do, and my world has not been shaken but is just balancing on the tightrope of temporary inconveniences. Just a few days ago, some work files lived their Iives here - or, rather, lives tightly linked with my life. Too many of them have piled upon my Google drive, so I spend some time deleting the ones I no longer need, methodically and thoroughly. This calms me down.

Most of them are descriptions of the projects completed a while ago. Their titles no longer evoke any associations. One of the documents is my own bio. It reads like a short story about a stranger who believes that nothing bad will ever happen. How would I describe myself now? A person in a big city where the war broke out. A person sheltering at the subway station. A person who used to do this and that. Or: I am a person living in Kyiv whose parents live in Ivano-Frankivsk and friends in Dnipro and Mykolaiv - but also in the capital, only in other neighborhoods, which makes them unreachable. We all talk and text one another, text and talk, trying to maintain this anxious connection of the tumultuous times - the connection based on words that form fragmented conversations, sometimes too short or ridiculous, but sometimes unexpectedly sincere. I keep no pets in my apartment. I broke up with my partner shortly before the war started, and these two events are not connected, of course. We have long reached that stage of the breaking up when the only thing that remains of the relationship is tortured conversations resembling pieces of thick thread that you use to try and stitch your completely separate lives together. Shortly before the war, our relationship reached that inevitable point when even sincerity and attempts to frankly explain what bothered me - two things everyone has been preaching to me since my adolescence - brought no relief since, in return, I always heard things I had no wish whatsoever to hear. It was a strange time: you still miss a person and yearn to meet and talk to them but feel like turning around and leaving as soon as you see them.

By the point the war broke out, I had just enough time to settle all matters up and fill in the part that remained empty after the person who shared everyday life with me for a few years left. However, I still keep in touch with Maksym. In late February, he went to the military enlistment office. We text one another every other day, and behind these dialogues, I glimpse a day that might arrive in the future - once he finds himself in a place with no cell signal. My friend Ania keeps saying that I'm still in love with him. I have no idea how to explain to her that I’m not and don't want to bring anything back, but I do worry about him - it is weird how relationships transform in war. Now I can even worry about perfect strangers. I can cry over those I have never seen.

I say ‘cry over' in a figurative sense - I have not been able to cry even once, but I learned all the shades of that nauseous melancholy that you always carry around like a pebble in your pocket and that pushes you down to the earth.

***

I see the last rays of the sun when I leave the subway in the late afternoon and go home: I want to take a shower, I want to have hot tea, I feel exhausted after several broken nights. I am sure that air raid sirens will go off this night, too, and I weigh the opportunity of sleeping in my own bed but with the air raid alarm on - against the night spent on a sleeping pad at the subway station, in the crowd but safe. The very fact of having to make a decision like that seems absurd. But I get used to it in a few days.

The death that stepped close to us in the early days of the war seems to have taken a step back. It's easier to make out its outlines now: we can see that it's composed of thousands of coincidences.

While someone sleeps in their bed in one apartment block, the missile hits another one. While people line up to a supermarket in Kyiv, Russians shoot at the people lining up for bread in Chernihiv. These coincidences are absurd.

Sometimes, I get so tired of thinking about them that dying looks like an easier option. But then I realize I just don't want to sort through them in my mind and have to accept the possibility of a coincidence. Otherwise, I won't be able to live a normal life.

My everyday life now consists of conversations, texting, and chats: with colleagues, volunteers, relatives, and friends - checking in to see if everyone is alright. You care for everyone, and it exhausts you - and at the same time, nourishes you - every single day.

We talk mainly about the war. Sometimes, I catch myself trying to explain something to someone but failing to find the right words. Occasionally, it feels like we're walking in circles around some point, unable to approach it, like magnets pushing each other away, and it does not let us fully understand each other.

Some things just cannot be put into words.

In the middle of the night, I see that Maksym is online.

"Can't sleep?" I ask him.

"Night shift."

"I thought so."

"I remember how you and I were awake half the night one summer when a bat flew inside through the open balcony door. Remember?"

I laugh because I remember it too well. Then I realize that Maksym can't see me and insert a few emojis.

"There's a bat here, too. We decided that it would be our war pet. We're almost friends now."

Falling asleep, I think about these transformations of space around me: a frightened bat in a studio apartment with large windows Maksym and I rented together; and a bat the friend on the frontline (where exactly? I can only imagine that place).

A shared experience in the past - and such a different experience now.

What do you mean?

Nothing much. I chatted with my ex-boyfriend last night. He's at war, and I'm here. Even though it's war here, too... But things look and feel so different that sometimes I feel as if he and I have been scattered across different worlds, you know? Although it's one country and one war. And I know that we, with these very different experiences, must try and stay in one and the same world - no matter what.

I have not spent the last few nights at the subway station - I go down to the basement of our prefab apartment block. It's small, and it is cold there, but it’s closer to my apartment. It's impossible to sleep there, so I walk down when the air raid sirens start blaring and back up when they go off.

Sometimes, I stay in my apartment and sleep on the floor in the hallway. I think about the winter. Surviving it was like reading a long boring book. it felt like you would never reach the end, every day resembling a tiny molecule in the sea of coldness, flattened like a thin page among other thin pages looking all the same. But you kept turning them, page after page until you realized there were fewer pages left till the end than till the beginning. But just as you almost reached the end, a large-scale war broke out.

I love spring, no matter what.

Today, I got water from the vending machine and walked back across the yard. Almost all families with children had left, and I realized I'd never seen the yard so silent. I sat on the swing and swung for a while, so it did not feel sad without kids.

It sounds ridiculous, I know.

At dawn, the air raid siren echoes especially loudly. It reverberates across the yard like the children's screams I heard, working at home on summer nights with the windows open. I no longer shudder, hearing explosions in the distance. When I hear artillery shelling a bit closer, I notice how different it sounds compared to air defense systems. Still, both of them are distant enough to feel safe for now.

The war in the big country rolls in waves. Today, your city is shelled, and tomorrow you read the news about shelling in another town and text your friends living there. Today, someone worries about you, and tomorrow you worry about someone else. You just have to learn how to live in between these waves.

Explanation: 

Ukrainian author Olia Rusina’s short storyThis Cannot Be Put Into Words (2022), articulates the everyday experience of Russian full-scale military bombardment – recorded in Kyiv from the night-time metro shelter, an apartment block hallway floor, between air-raid sirens, distant memories, and fragmented online messages from the narrator’s ex-partner, Maksym, now on the front lines. The littoral location serves a powerful metaphorical function in Rusina’s text, most notably in its articulation of time as something distorted and bent out of joint by the experience of war. “The war in the big country”, writes Rusina, “rolls in waves. Today, your city is shelled, and tomorrow you read the news about shelling in another town and text your friends living there. Today, someone worries about you, and tomorrow you worry about someone else. You just have to learn how to live in between these waves.”