I told my boss I had long Covid and quit the job with a straight face. He blinked at me like he knew I was lying but didn’t care enough to ask. Two days later, I was on a bus rattling toward the Ukrainian border, a duffel of body armor and MREs in the hold, wondering if this was the stupidest or bravest thing I’d ever done. Probably both.
The bus was crammed with women and children. They clutched plastic bags, baby blankets, cheap suitcases. None of them looked at me directly. Maybe it was the plates on my vest sticking out under my hoodie, or the way my eyes didn’t match theirs: I was going in, not out. The border guard barely raised his head when he stamped my passport. For all my grandiose fantasies, I wasn’t special to anyone but myself.
In Lviv, the war felt like a rumor folded into daily life. Cafés stayed open, hipsters smoked under murals that read “Glory to Ukraine,” air raid sirens howled like bored dogs, and nobody flinched. I walked the cobblestones in my boots and thought about how I’d brought freeze-dried pasta when I could have just sat down to steak and wine. It was embarrassing.
The NGO man found me through a Facebook group. American, sharp eyes, beard full of cigarette ash. He sized me up like a dog at a shelter.
“What took you so long to get here?” he asked.
I didn’t have an answer.
His “organization” was a mismatched band of circus runaways, retired cops, backpackers with God complexes. They cleared rubble, taught Ukrainians how to tourniquet a leg, ferried supplies in beat-up vans. They called it an NGO; it looked more like a halfway house for the restless. But for the first time in years, I wasn’t scrolling a map from behind a desk. I was in the story, breathing it.
Weeks later I was crouched in a trench, knees pressed into cold mud, scanning the treeline four hundred meters out. The Russians were ghosts in that forest, sometimes rattling machine guns just to prove they existed. We answered only when we had to. Once I lobbed a grenade for “funsies,” as if this were still a game. It wasn’t.
The Canadian in the hole beside mine had worked construction. He showed me how to keep our feet clean by bagging them in trash sacks when the mud got too thick. We played Minesweeper on our phones and pretended it was practice for spotting mines in fields we’d never cross.
One Greek kid with us, wiry and wild-eyed, climbed up to fix the tarp during a downpour. A bullet hissed past his head with the sound of someone blowing across a beer bottle. He fell back in, grinning like he’d just cheated death. Maybe he had.
At night, the artillery whispered in the distance. Sometimes drones hovered above us, little mechanical angels deciding who to bless with shrapnel. I crouched low and wondered if death was hot, or nothing at all.
And still, part of me felt calmer than I ever had in an office chair. For once, I wasn’t waiting for the future me to show up and do something worth remembering. I was here. I was doing it.
When the next barrage landed close enough to throw dirt into my teeth, I laughed. Not because it was funny. Because I finally understood I wasn’t playing anymore.
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