By Olha Svyripa
I lie down on a park bench and count my rapid breaths – one, two, three, … I force longer exhales, force longer inhales, my lungs feel like collapsing. I can’t breathe.
I close my eyes and listen to my heart pounding – one, two, three, … It’s like a wounded animal inside my rib cage, rushing back and forth, bleeding, dying. I lie still.
“I feel like it is my fault,” somebody talks right into my ear.
Broken pieces of thoughts march through my head, up to my skull, through my tangled hair, and down to the broken glass on the asphalt. I watch two huge dogs fight over a pink squeaky bone-shaped toy.
Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it.
“What you said?”
I watch the blue sky of an early spring crumble. It’s debris falling onto the city. Black holes left behind.
“It’s like I’m sending those missiles over to you.”
“Right!” I shout out sarcastically. “Wait, what?”
“I’m fine when the missiles are headed down from the North, you know. But then sometimes they would change direction, and go your way, to the West. And I always feel like it’s my fault.”
Oh, you trying to be funny. Wind sweeps through the brand-new green leaves – one, two, three…
“Right! I’ve always wondered why you don’t just catch them with a sweep-net!”
Our hollow laughter is coughed out into the cold air of an early spring. I watch a flock of ravens hurled into the crumbling sky by a gust of wind. I lose your words somewhere in the cracks of my mind.
Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it in the fresh green leaves. In my pounding heart. In my broken thoughts.
I close my eyes and count the springs of war – one, two, three…
* * *
Olha Svyripa started writing two years ago, drawing directly from her war experiences in Ukraine. So far, she’s got seven pieces in Atticus Review about the war’s first day and a flash, “Day 542,” in Another Chicago Magazine, which is part of her “Days of War” series, sharing snapshots of life during the war.