The War Doesn’t End When the Sirens Stop

The first time the air raid siren woke me, I didn’t recognize the sound. It wasn’t the sharp, electronic wail I’d heard in movies or news clips. It was deeper, rougher, like a voice screaming through a rusted megaphone. My body knew before my mind did. I was on the floor, hands over my head, before I even remembered I was supposed to be afraid.

That was two years ago.

Now, I sleep through them. Or I try to. My brain has learned to file the sound under *background noise*, like traffic or a neighbor’s dog. But my heart hasn’t. It still clenches, still counts the seconds between the alert and the thud of impact, still calculates how far away it is this time. *Close enough to shake the windows? Close enough to run?*

The war doesn’t end when the sirens stop. It just changes shape.

---

We don’t talk about the way time works here anymore. There’s the time on the clock, and then there’s *war time*—the way minutes stretch into hours when you’re huddled in a basement, the way weeks disappear when you’re standing in line for bread or medicine or the chance to charge your phone. The world outside Ukraine measures the conflict in headlines: *"Counteroffensive Stalls," "Aid Package Delayed," "Global Attention Shifts."* But here, time is measured in smaller things. The number of days since the last blackout. The number of nights your child sleeps without waking up screaming. The number of birthdays celebrated in a shelter, the cake just a slice of dry bread with a single candle stuck in the middle.

My neighbor, Olena, turned 70 last month. She spent the evening in the corridor of her apartment building—the safest place, she’d decided—with a thermos of tea and a photo album. "At least the memories don’t need electricity," she joked. Her hands shook as she turned the pages. I didn’t tell her I noticed.

---

The world has a short memory for wars that don’t end quickly. I understand, in a way. People can’t live in a state of constant outrage. They can’t keep their hearts broken forever. But that’s the thing about broken hearts: they don’t just heal. They scar. And the scar tissue is sensitive. It aches when the weather changes. It twinges when someone overseas asks, *"Is it still bad there?"* as if "bad" is a binary state, as if we’re not still learning to live in the in-between.

I used to get angry when the news cycles moved on. Now, I just feel invisible.

The grocery store near my apartment has a new section now: *"Essentials for Survival."* Canned food, batteries, tourniquets. The cashier, a woman in her 50s with a son on the front lines, calls it "the apocalypse aisle." We laugh, but it’s not funny. It’s just easier than crying.

---

The hardest part isn’t the explosions. It’s the silence that follows. The way the city holds its breath after an attack, waiting to see what’s still standing. The way your phone buzzes with messages from friends abroad—*"Are you okay?"*—and you don’t know how to answer. *Am I okay?* I’m alive. My apartment still has walls. The water runs, most days. But "okay" feels like a word from another life.

I teach English online now. My students are scattered across Europe, America, Australia. They ask me about Kyiv, about the "situation." I tell them the city is beautiful in the spring, the chestnut trees in bloom. I don’t tell them about the sandbags stacked outside the post office, or the way the subway stations still double as bomb shelters, or how I’ve memorized the quickest route to the nearest one from my door.

They don’t ask about those things. Maybe they don’t want to know.

---

The war has taught me that resilience isn’t what I thought it was. It’s not some grand, heroic thing. It’s small. It’s making coffee in the morning even when you’re not sure there will be power to heat it. It’s planting flowers in the courtyard where a missile landed last winter. It’s laughing at a joke in a café, then flinching when a car backfires outside.

It’s also exhaustion. It’s the way my friend Ira, a doctor, cries in her car between shifts because she can’t remember the last time she slept more than four hours. It’s the way my father, who used to be so proud, now flinches at loud noises. It’s the way we’ve all become experts in pretending, in performing normalcy for each other, for the world, for ourselves.

---

The international news crews still come, sometimes. They film the damaged buildings, the lines for humanitarian aid, the faces of the newly displaced. They ask us to tell our stories. We do. We tell them about the night the maternity hospital was hit, about the friend who didn’t make it to the shelter in time, about the way the sky turns orange when the drones come at night.

They nod. They take notes. They leave.

And we’re still here.

---

I walked past a playground yesterday. A little girl, no older than six, was swinging alone. Her mother sat on a bench nearby, scrolling through her phone. The swings creaked, a slow, steady rhythm. *Back and forth. Back and forth.* Like the ticking of a clock. Like the turning of a page.

I wanted to tell her mother to put the phone away. To hold her daughter. To whisper, *"I’ve got you."* But what do I know? Maybe she was reading the news. Maybe she was waiting for word from her husband at the front. Maybe she was just stealing a moment of distraction, the way we all do.

The girl looked up at me and smiled. "Do you want to push me?" she asked.

I did.

Because what else is there to do but keep moving? Back and forth. Back and forth. Even when the world isn’t watching. Even when it feels like no one cares.

The war doesn’t end when the sirens stop. It just becomes part of the air we breathe. Part of the way we live. Part of the way we love.

And the world moves on.

But we don’t. We can’t. We’re still here.