Went to the library to order in some books. A memoir and a biography. It seems these are the two genre's I read mostly these days. Distanced from fiction.
But every few hours I check the news on the war being staged in UKRAINE.
I try to imagine what it would be like if there was combat in the streets here. If apartment buildings were being hit by missiles here. If thousands of women and children were taking shelter in the subways, without food and water. If men eighteen to sixty were told they must not leave the country but must stay and fight in any way they can.
Reports that Putin is actually mentally ill. Suggestions that he has been affected by a Covid infection - something wrong with his brain - not thinking straight. Notions that he wants to recreate the Soviet Union as his last effort before he leaves office. Notions that he will never resign or retire.
Sean Penn in Ukraine filming.
At the library there was a woman who told me that she had just gotten out of a mental hospital. She said so much was going wrong in her life that she just couldn't take it any more. She's been trying to find her adult son. She suggested that he was involved in criminality and was an addict. She had to find him. He was somewhere in LA. I had to wonder if he was the main cause of mental distress or if she hoped he would help her. Too many people lost to the maze of drug addiction. Too many criminals, sociopaths, who deliberately seek out those who need escape, to hook them, to traffic them. Too much evil.
A boom goes off in the neighborhood.
Somewhere down the street - possibly in a house - there is someone who likes to shoot off something once in a while. A gun or perhaps something in the category of a firework. This person always does this at the exact top of an hour. I imagine this person to be a man and imagine the man going outside into a yard. And usually at a time when many people are sleeping. Just one loud and unexpected boom.
Does he feel relieved after he destroys the sleep of others? Is he discharging an emotion?
Is he someone who should be bearing arms?
"I feel overwhelmed," I said to the woman at the library. "It's all so much bigger than me."
On the walk home I encountered some workman blocking a sidewalk in front of a house that looked like it needed some refurbishing. Old trees had been beheaded months ago and their trunks stood in front of the house. I asked a man," Are the trees dead? Is there any sign that they are going to sprout?"
"It's been six months. No leaves," he said in accented English.
We agreed that the trees were too traumatized from beheading to be alive.
"Where are you from?"
"Hungary."
The man told me he had gone back and forth to Hungary for some years and then one day he realized he was not going back. He was from the southern part and had been born in what is now Yugoslavia. He talked about Hungary being chopped after World War II, so that it's now one third the size that it was before.
I knew about that.
"Do you think refugees from UKRAINE are going to flood into Hungary?"
"No, they will go into Romania. The border with Hungary is small. Romania," he said.
What is it like to flee with nothing but a rolling suitcase, not knowing where you will be safe, where you will sleep, where you will find a bathroom when you have to use one?
Here in America, our refugees are the homeless.
One place to go is the library.
C 2022 Christine Trzyna
