Fears, emptiness, the unknown, and despair have faces — mostly ours
In a poem by Attyla Mohylnyi, the best poet of Kyiv’s streets, picking his way through the snowdrifts of his past, he, too, foresaw that every winter:
“…this may be the last time
snow falls so quietly.”
The days rolled on into yet another “beginning”, piling on top of one another, falling like the first pebbles that will trigger an avalanche of these same days, which may turn out to be anything. Tomorrow is still impossible to describe, to predict, or to sense.
The coming year has arrived, and it is not new at all, but quite the same one, stuck for each of us in our own limbo. Someone wants the war to end, someone hopes for a pause to catch their breath and rearm, someone tries to want nothing and continues to fight; someone runs and does not look back so as not to become a pillar of salt, or simply because they have no ties to these lands and no need to stand firmly on them, lighting their way, even with a candle perhaps — because they simply do not know that sometimes a match’s flare is enough to drive away the demons that lurk in the dark — our own demons.
Are you afraid of the dark? I no longer know what I am afraid of. Having listened to scary stories, I once ran through the room at night and jumped onto the bed so that the blackness would not grab me by the leg and take me away… I have no idea where. How do you drive away demons? Reach a hand out to them, and with the other hand, holding a candle, shine light on their face? They have faces: emptiness, fears, the unknown, despair — any demon to your taste. Mostly, these are our faces. So times of outages are a good time to think about it.
Are you afraid of dragons and chimeras?
This photograph by Viacheslav Ratynskyi is one from a short series of observations of Kyiv on the eve of the new year. What kind of year? A familiar one. This shot from Andriivskyi Descent captures house No. 15 — the spired “Richard’s Castle” at the foot of Uzdykhalnytsia Hill — which immediately brings me back to the poems of the best poet of Kyiv’s streets, who slightly lifts the veil of the future.
“While snow is falling,
sad dragons on buildings
will remember us,
because it is only Richard
who dropped by Kyiv
to build a castle and leave,
and we stay here
forever.”
Photo: Viacheslav Ratynskyi
Text: Vira Kuryko
