Sleepless Breaths

Mykhailo had never seen Bucha. He had never been to Donbas. Memories of Kyiv came to him in a cerebral slideshow as he drifted to bed. A stream of cold, clear water. Cobblestones and brass statues. The hollow steps of a beetle’s leg on a fallen log. Everynight these images flashed across the canvas of his eyelids. A police siren ringing out through the brownstones in his neighborhood would snap him out of it. And he’d lay there. Looking at the ceiling. Wondering what home meant. 

He gets up after trying to fall asleep again. His apartment is small with wooden floors and brick walls. Pipes snake below the ceiling. His furniture is wooden and sustainable and expensive. He has 15 coasters scattered around his 576 square-foot space. They live on the oak dresser and nightstands, the recycled pine coffee table. A pack of cigarettes and his car keys sit next to a stack of three coasters on the square dining room table.

He reaches for the pack and lights one. In the kitchen he grabs a tumbler and taps the ash into it. He leans on the bar and looks out at the city that is supposed to be his home. New York. Sent there to change the world. Instead, the world changed him.

It was on nights like this that Mykhailo paced. What else could he do? His phone flashed pictures of dead bodies in clothes his grandparents wore in the few framed photos he had setting on his dresser. Television was no better. Or it felt like a distraction. No one would talk to him this early in the morning. So he paced and smoked and paced and paused to take note of the changes in light on the sky that peeked through the highrises and skyscrapers. 

The feeling that most turned his stomach was indescribable at the time. The souring whiskey moving through his guts, the smoke, the images of his mother leading him through a park in a land far away, and then the bodies was all too much. Nausea racked his body and after just fifteen minutes of this nightly routine, the only relief would be found back in bed. Back to staring at the ceiling. Breathing. Trying to think of nothing, but letting everything arise. Recognizing it and returning to the breath. Beginning again. And again. And again.

Then the rain started falling.