They tell me it's PTSD too. When bombs are buzzing inside, tearing thoughts and words to shreds. Nothing comes to the surface. Even tears, as if in emergency mode, are collected in some hitherto unknown sump, cooling the psyche reactor, and do not flow. I'm frozen.

My real war began not in the basement at Nauki 69 in Kyiv, where I spent the first week of the “special operation” of the orcs to “rescue” me, but from a call from my husband: “They killed Sasha Zubenko. Tanya has a shrapnel wound to the head..

Irpin came under massive shelling from the first days. Entire families along the entire direction of the Zhytomyr highway on the outskirts of Kiev and the new Bucha-Irpen-Kyiv road were locked in the cages of their private houses, apartments and basements. These small towns and villages, including Borodyanka, Nemeshaevo, Gostomel, Yablonka... became and remain the main battlefield for Ukraine. Like Kharkov exploding from missiles, besieged and inhumanely destroyed Mariupol, wiped off the face of the earth Akhtyrka....

Footage of direct hits of cruise missiles on residential buildings in Irpin spread around the world. As well as the destroyed bridge across the Irpin River, under which thousands of peaceful Ukrainians hid from the " But Putin killed Sasha even before the " The shot city has been blocked for the third week.

After another rocket explosion at school No. 2, which is opposite the multi-storey building of Sasha and Tanya, he went out into the hall to see if the fragments had hit the gas distribution communications on the floor. " Somewhere there was another explosion. Showered glass. Dad fell, - says Sasha's son Maxim, rocking Sasha's two-month-old grandson in his arms. - And then there was a nightmare. Mom crawled up to dad all in blood. Dad said he couldn't feel his legs and that he was probably... dying. Mom (and Tanya is a doctor. - AND. ) opened his sports jacket. There was a big wound in place of the heart... "

Tanya managed to be taken to Kyiv by ambulance. Today she and her grandson are safe in Ivano-Frankivsk. Tanya no longer has a husband or a home - a few days later a shell hit her and Sasha's apartment. Her bedridden mother, who lived on the floor below, was first taken by parishioners to a nearby temple, then accepted by the capital's nursing home. And Sasha remained lying in the corridor. Near their once cozy apartment, where we drank homemade wine so many times in the kitchen and looked at the evening Irpin from a bird's eye view. Then the neighbors reported that they moved it to the basement of the entrance.

Since then, I can’t get out of this basement floor, where our friend spends his last days on this earth.. I feel the grayness of the walls of this empty space. The coldness of his cement floor. The gaping emptiness of their once warm home, for which Sasha and Tanya have been collecting money for so long. And his humble loneliness. While without the Kingdom of Heaven....

Since then, we have not stopped looking for someone who will take Sasha. At first they hoped for Zhenya's family, who lives nearby. He and his neighbors were ready to pick up and bury Sasha. But now, in these very moments, Zhenya, together with her little daughter Masha and his wife Oksana, is sitting in the basement at Mira, 3-b. Twentieth day. I've only been in contact a couple of times in recent days.. To say that I could not pick up Sasha. And I haven’t been able to leave my own Hell either….

Then some very young girl Rina appeared, a friend of my colleague's daughter. She, as part of a brigade of volunteers, took the “two hundredths” from Irpen. The guys, having received all the information from us (including the fact that the body is whole, and not in parts), went after Sasha on the first day of the " I even sent a tag in Google - Turgenevskaya 25-v, so that the earthly assistant Aida would quickly get to the basement. But it didn't work out.

“They didn’t let us in, but I passed on the information. Today they don't give 200. Evacuation. God willing in a couple of days... "

Rina wrote again two days later. As I promised.

" From there only take out. 200 no one takes. That's an order. Nothing guys. You can't help the dead. Then one day they will all be taken out. Right now there is no traffic. The bridge is destroyed....

There was another group of volunteers that I tracked on Facebook.. I contacted them through a colleague.. Today I received an SMS from them: “The guy who broke through there several times disappeared in Irpin for three days.. Do nothing now. Only to bury on the spot in mass graves, and after the war to do an exhumation and deal with the names "

“Thank you for trying,” Sasha’s son wrote in response to my next scary SMS. The thin face of this boy with sunken cheeks and an extinct look, on whose shoulders in an instant there were four women and a baby, will always be with me..

As well as the two hands of my parents who escaped from Bucha with wedding rings, which they have not worn for a hundred years. So they prepared for the worst. When you decided not to go down to the basement anymore. Mom was sick.

Like the grief of my former neighbor, who fled with children under shelling on the last day of the evacuation from the outskirts of the private sector. Where her older sister was left with a paralyzed mother and a Russian tank in the yard.

As well as video footage of a mass grave in the courtyard of the Buchi temple, which I walked past so many times.. 67 bodies in black plastic bags were placed by doctors and public utilities workers in a narrow trench dug in height. Everything, as we saw on the footage of the Second World War. Only now the fascists are different.

I'm sorry Sasha.

We will definitely pick you up and do everything right.

When I put an end to this text, Maxim wrote to me. “Dad was buried today. Opposite the house in the school yard. Yuri Ivanovich from the eighth floor - he is in the defense - and the soldiers. They even made a salute, like an officer" Kingdom of heaven. But I decided not to change anything. Post as posted. How many more of our relatives and friends were left completely alone, not found by anyone, not identified and not interred in this war....