Fear like honey (Drifting off)

I am trying to fall asleep in a windowless room in Chernihiv. The Ukrainian air defence is shooting down incoming drones. I have not slept much in the past week, and in the pitch-black I am gradually losing my sense of space.

As I drift off, the ground is gone, up and down is arbitrary. It isn’t a hypnic jerk, when the body panics, thinking it’s falling. I am falling, but instead of jolting me awake, the fear is like drowning in honey.

My nose and my mouth are full of soil. Somehow, I can still breathe. I swallow, I chew, but I keep falling. I keep eating the soil, I keep scratching forward. I know I need to get back to the surface.

I pass out in this dream, and when I wake up, I am surrounded by doctors.

I somehow know they caught me. My nails are full of soil, my fingers are bloody. I make fists to hide it. My teeth, too, must be black with soil. I realise I must not speak.

She’s a one of the crazies, the nurse remarks. Look at her hands. And she is not local. I need to stay quiet. You can sedate her anyway, the doctor says, bored.

I realise, with horror, that they are speaking my mother tongue.

Stories come with beginnings and endings. Dreams don’t.

The scene changes and I am closed in a conference room. On the projector, a horse is dying. Its nostrils are larger than the bold head of the man who seems to be presenting. The eyes of the horse are puddles of raw fear, the whites are red. The audience is silent, calm. I cannot hear my own breathing.

Can you inhale if you haven’t exhaled?

Mine is not a story. This war in Ukraine is not a story.

When the sky stops being a source of horror, something awful will end.

Then, one day, the war will become a story, it will be squeezed into textbooks.

In my dream, the audience keeps staring at the horse. They are puzzled, bored, embarrassed. The horse is not a metaphor, but it keeps dying. The next presenter is shuffling her papers. I stand up, jumping the queue, I know I must speak, speak fast and loud. Someone is munching on a banana. I fiddle with my necklace, which is made out of painted, empty bullet casings. The horse is dying. I forget what I wanted to say.

I wake up in the same pitch-black underground room. For a second, I don’t yet know where I am. My phone tells me it’s 6 AM. It’s quiet, Chernihiv is still asleep. I might slip out to see the sun rise. For now, nothing is flying towards us.