Life in the time of warfare

Some troubling questions from a family caught in the middle of an armed conflict 

I’m a regular guy in his early thirties, happily married to the nicest girl on the planet. This brings up problems.

However, I’m not going to cry on your shoulder about the tribulations of a family life, being a guy who lived with his parents until he was 29 and at some point realized that it had become inappropriate.

I’m also not listing the issues you face as a couple for the first six/twelve/eighteen months into your marriage. Issues that you always face. Because you’re two grown individuals with different kinds of life experience, views on family costs, future kids and this whole lot of other stuff.

We’re still madly in love with each other, though.

And yet there’s a tremendous weight, this burden upon my shoulders. Something that’s stressing me out like hell, something that keeps me awake at night, something that I can’t just shrug off, nor can I do anything about it, because it’s that huge, and imminent, and devastating.

Thing is, my country is being ravaged by civil war, and I’ve got no idea how that’s going to end up for us.

It’s still raging on a hundred miles from our town, remaining pretty much a picture on a computer screen, a tweet of a friend, a voice on the phone. So far it’s only people in camo on the streets, climbing prices, a flow of refugees. More of a filament, really, but growing day by day. This also raises questions.

Should we prepare for war and famine? Should we squirrel away as much food and medical supplies as we possibly can? Should we save money or should we spend it on something valuable? Like, really valuable? Like gold, maybe?

Do we have to leave the country? No one’s expecting us elsewhere, no one cares about us, no one’s going to give a hand. Or a damn, for that matter.

And the most important question: isn’t it too late?

My grandma would know. She survived three wars, two revolutions and a grievous famine. Always the optimist, “we’ll manage somehow”, that’s what she would say. Only she’s gone, and the question remains.

I search Youtube and watch live feeds from the cities I used to visit and the streets I used to walk. Now they lie in broken pieces, “where the wind howls and the vultures sing”, as it were. I fear to find the people I know there. Or those I used to know.

The thoughts keep me restless, they buzz inside my head every day, no matter what I do. Yesterday multiple rocket launchers and howitzers leveled another town, a hundred and fifty miles away, to the ground. People are dying by the thousands.

Is our family going to survive? What if we flee abroad? What if we don’t? There’s a nuclear power plant twenty miles from our town, what if it blows up? What if it’s going to blow up tonight?

And the refrain never fades: “is it too late? is it too late?”

Is it?