Lost in Space

She’s back. Her eyes look different, like traveling back and forth, didn’t do well. As if the pressure of being in different places at the same time, lingers on.

She’s silent. While I explain the grammar of things like past perfect and past continuous. This new language for her. She wants to be in Ukraine, with her family, friends and father. Not in fucking Brussels.

She’ll go back, when peace enters the mind of all people in Ukraine and Russia, and the rest of this judging world. When they don’t see fear, but see the same people, with different dreams maybe, but with the same wishes: to be free and to life their own life, far away from in ego rooting politicians.

That’s what I see in her eyes.

“How was it?” I ask here after some silence and preparing exercises online.
“I’m even more motivated now to learn the language.” She says, not ironically, she means it, I see determination in her eyes. 
“Yes?”
“Yes, you can’t believe it…”
Lena hesitates.
“It’s not my hometown anymore, I didn’t recognize my beautiful city. It’s…”

She takes her mobile phone and shows me a small movie she made. Shaking images of feet, a street and a weird sound in the background.

“The sound that you hear is from drones flying over our city.”
Lena pauses for a moment, no, that’s not what she wanted to see.

I hold back.
“Shall we continue working on grammar?” She nods.
I open the site. She looks ahead, a little absentmindedly. She knows that she will have to learn this language, that she will have to stay here for some time.

“I’m sorry, I can’t focus”
“No problem.”

“I feel hurt, I can’t find the energy right now, it will take time.”

“Just take your time, and make small notes on what you feel and think, maybe someday you can tell your story.”

She gives me a little smile. It won’t have sense to do grammar now.
Maybe it’ll help to talk about what happened, and I try to open some doors. 

“But, everything is okay now you went back, you know with the papers and stuff?”
“Yes, and my mother had also a shop there,” she tells a little more enthusiast, “I grew up in that shop you know, helping customers and tourist, from since kindergarten.” She smiles, but it changes quickly.
“Now we closed it, we did sell everything…” While she bites away her remorse.

“And how is it with your family?”
“Given the circumstances, well.”
“They don’t want to go to another country like you?”
“They can’t, they have sons and they can’t leave the country, many man has to stay.”
“And your father, you did see him?”

She nods, and definitely doesn’t want to say too much about it. A little tear tries to escape, but she holds on.

“A friend of mine, twenty years old, fights at the border and he has been shot by a Russian soldier… He’s dead now.”

I feel useless, I want to help her, to comfort here, but, I can’t. I lay for a second my hand on Lena’s back. She smiles. I look at her. This brave young woman. Whose situation is far more anxious than mine.

“You now, it is really courageous how you deal with it and did dare to go back, and still want to fight for your future here. I don’t know how I would manage or even hold on.”

Lena smiles. Her eyes shows that there’s still a spirit alive in her. Yes, she’s got a story to tell. 

And I? Maybe. If I can shake off my useless thoughts and can become a better version of myself. I could tell something about the things I see and the people I meet, and my family’s story, who’s also broken but, on another level. 

One day she and I will tell our own story. Completely different but still the same, a story of people searching for more humanity and writing about breaking so called rules, and about healing; cause if you want to improve the world, you first start with yourself, your own roots and if possible, your family’s heritage and then you listen and reach out to those who are lost, as the healing will evolve in connecting with each other. Not in fighting.

No president or king or leader should start their mission because they feel broken and projects their fears on others. If they do, he or she or them will just react as a small lost child. Like many others. And it’s okay to go on a personal mission, but not when you involve millions of people with it, while hurting them, because you’re just lost. 

Lost in space.

As we all are.

Some days, some years.