The Basement Diaries 48

[b]Somewhere in Ukraine - 28 February 2023 about 01:30[/b]

So long since I wrote anything. Well, maybe not so long, only five days. It seems like a lifetime.

A lot has happened, here and in the world. The "in the world" things you will know about, or at least have had the opportunity to know. What has happened here, "here" being measured only by my presence rather than any fixed geographical location, is another thing, another series of things, altogether.

We are into the second year of this phase of Russia's invasion. Or we are approaching the tenth anniversary of Russia's first move this century to destroy us. Ninety years since Holodomor, when Russia killed, by some estimates, ten per cent of the Ukrainian population. Holodomor- killing by starvation. Literally, what they did, in 1932 to 1933. Another year in Russia's relentless attempt to crush us. And there are other estimates that up to twenty per cent of our population died. Three and a half million people. Ten million people. With that many deaths, accuracy is almost an obscenity. Every death was in itself an obscenity.

Sometimes, we need to step back. To see our present war in its historical context. Not as a chapter in Putin's great Russian novel War and Lies.

I learned today of the death of another university friend, fighting the invader. How many are gone that I do not know about? How many among the maimed, the physically and mentally crippled?

And, yes, it is true. When I knew these people at university, when I talked with them, shared lectures and tutorials, before COVID shut us down. When we ate and drank together, danced, shouted above the music, cheered on our favourite bands. It is true, in those days, that I did not think of them as friends. It was not necessary. We owned time and space, we were immortal.

Now, there are fewer immortals. The departed ones have become friends, simply by departing.

So friendship manifests in what is lost. All potential gone.