01 Did You Hear That?

It was around 5 am, on February 24, when the sound of two distant explosions, about half a second between them, woke me up. I was on the left side of the bed, laying on my right side. I opened my eyes and I saw Rita, facing up, eyes partially opened.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered. We have a habit of whispering or speaking very softly when it’s dark. I think it’s a way to keep a calm vibe when it’s early morning or when we’re close to bed time.

“Yeah…” she replied calmly.

“What the…?”

“I think it’s the construction site that’s behind that building, remember?”

“I don’t know….” I started to get nervous.

She went to the bathroom and I reached for my phone, I opened Twitter as it’s usually the fastest way to get news. There it was: “Vladimir Putin announces special military operation in Ukraine, calls for men to lay down their arms.”

She came back from the bathroom and I showed her my phone, we both sat down on the bed, looking at each other.

“What should we do?” she said, still whispering.

“I would say, let’s start by moving our bag and the carriers away from the windows, they’re in the balcony.” She agreed.

I got up, and took a carry-on bag and two cat carriers from the balcony. Up until that point, an affordable apartment with two balconies and many windows near the center of Kyiv was a dream. Now, I was thinking that anything could burst through those windows and kill us any second.

“Apparently they hit Boryspil” she said looking at her phone. I couldn’t believe it. The airport that we’ve been through so many times, could it be? Is it gone? Were there people there? I felt nauseous, my mind started rushing. In the past few days, we briefly talked about what we would do if this happened, but we didn’t think it was necessary to be scared, or to plan too many details. We were wrong.

Fortunately, we are the type of people that think fast, and act fast; Rita usually does both faster than me, so at that moment we stopped whispering, and we started communicating in clear, assertive phrases.

“I’m gonna call Zhenya” she said. Our relatives, Zhenya’s parents, live in the outskirts of Kyiv, and told us that we should go there if anything happened. Zhenya and his wife Nastya were living in the city now, so we thought we could all go together.

“I’m gonna start packing. Toss a change of clothes in the open bag, I’ll pack everything” I started to get dressed while I picked a few clothes for the bag and started packing. I’m the one who has travelled back and forth more, and has more experience making things fit in a small bag. I packed as quickly as I could, while she was in the hallway of the apartment. That hallway is the only place without direct view of a window. I snatched both cats and put them in their carriers, both carriers in the hallway too.

“Nastya says they’re almost home, they can’t pick us up. I’m gonna call a cab.” She said while she was finishing getting dressed.

It must’ve been around 6:00 am when we were ready, we had some nuts, water, few clothes, an empty cat toilet, and our passports and other IDs; we walked outside to wait for the cab. While we were on the sidewalk waiting, a man rushed past us, dressed in full military fatigues, carrying a tactical backpack, heading towards the subway station in Palats Ukraina. I knew where he was going, we all knew what was going on. I just now wonder if that guy is still alive.