War looks like my cousin Vasil not coming home last summer, his construction job in Stuttgart gone cold, and now he’s in Lviv moving boxes he won’t describe. It looks like my journalism professor crying when the new media group bought our local paper — Serbs this time, or maybe Russians pretending to be Serbs, who cares, they fired half the staff. It looks like the Roma boys from my street signing up for private security firms because the army at least pays in euros, not promises. I took night shifts so I could afford textbooks, but now I hear Ukrainian voices on the line too — same hollow tone, same rehearsed calm. War here isn’t sirens. It’s the quiet way we stop expecting things to last. It’s knowing your country is poor and tired and always on someone’s border, never at the center.
0