After the blast

what followed the May 24th attack on Kyiv

It’s harder for me to come back here this time, to say something, say anything. After a russian missile blast wrecked my neighborhood, it’s been harder to keep up a rhythm of life. The hit has caused damage of varying degrees to windows and walls in my building. Emergency services switched the gas off in all apartments because a wire malfunction induced some stray electric current in the gas pipe. We don’t need a potential gas leak to explode. We’ve had enough explosions. In fact, russia launched another mass attack against Kyiv on June 2nd, barely a week after I collected myself in the aftermath of May 24th.

Metal letters blown off a building sign lie scattered across glass-covered pavement. Sort of an analogy to how I felt after the blast.

There is still so much to collect in the aftermath, so much is scattered to reassemble again. It took about a week for our community and the emergency services to collect the debris and broken glass, to remove the giant heaps and piles of broken items from the streets.

Pile of debris from the explosions, on the streets of Podil district.

The noise of excavators outside my window broke through my attempts to focus on work. That noise, the scratching of metal over glass, the jangling clinking shards, I shut myself off from it, but the windows’ locks broke in two when my windows swung inwards from the explosion. Without the locks, I can’t lock the noise out.

The broken locks of my windows.

I tried to arrange as many work meetings as possible to get out of my neighborhood, I asked to co-work at a friend’s place, I went to distant coffee shops. And when I did, the strange wave of feelings came over me, and I would start crying in the middle of the street, in the middle of a different street than mine, where no wooden panels had to replace broken windows, where traffic was the only source of background noise. I would just stop and realize the ringing in my head in the place of coherent thoughts, in the place of words. From this ringing, from this emptiness, I could produce nothing of use to anyone, nothing that would make me recognizable to anyone, or seen.

I’ve been feeling lonelier than ever, a bit disconnected, once again reassessing and scouting how to move forward and wondering whether the lightning - the missile - does strike twice in the same place. If it does, what do I need to add to the emergency backpack I’m bringing with me onto the metro platform? What if the next time I re-emerge from the metro, all of the neighborhood burns?

And how to connect, how to get back to everyday conversations, how to make breakfast when the gas stove is off and won’t be on in the foreseeable future? What kinds of food can I order in, or put together simply enough? And can I turn my phone off this night to catch some uninterrupted sleep? When will the repairs guy come in to replace my window locks? What if the thunderstorms of June flood me through the slits in my poorly closed windows? Such small and inconsequential questions, such tiny problems, but they wouldn’t pile up if it weren’t for the russians flinging all their missile arsenal onto Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure just because they can.

Those russians like the number 24, don’t they? Their full-scale invasion into Ukraine began on February 24th, and I’ve noticed that some of their most vicious attacks against civilians happened on the 24th of the month. I made note of the April 24th, 2025 attack, when ballistic missiles rained on Kyiv with no air defense to stop them. May 24th, 2026, the very neighborhood I live in got caught in the ballistic storm. I wonder what cosmic relevance they’ve assigned to this number. Or perhaps there’s no relevance at all, no meaning; they do it just because they can and because they are still opposed by very few, opposed by Ukraine’s Defense Forces and our allies.

I can’t recollect the version of me that I used to be before any of this happened, the version of me before February 24th, 2022; she’s now gone, irrevocably. But I keep collecting myself; it’s a skill. Life goes on, and May 25th arrives, May 26th arrives, and the days follow with no break. I make plans to go to Lviv, to patch up the apartment before the cold season, to balance my personal needs and professional commitments, to fit more life into this rhythm in between the attacks, to make more of the spaces that are still whole.

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