Today I woke up early in the morning to see eight unanswered calls on my cell phone. It was my parents and some friends. At first I thought something had happened to my family and that my friends were trying to reach me because for some reason my parents had alerted them first. Then my imagination went in another direction and I thought of an accident, a dangerous situation in the center of Kyiv, something to warn your friends about. I felt a cold uneasiness. I called my cousin, because her beautiful voice always has a calming effect on me, brave and rational. She just said: Kyiv has been shelled. A war has broken out.

Many things have a beginning. When I think about the beginning, I imagine a line drawn very clearly through a white space. The eye observes the simplicity of this trail of movement—one that is sure to begin somewhere and end somewhere. But I have never been able to imagine the beginning of a war. Strange. I was in the Donbas when war with Russia broke out in 2014. But I had entered the war then, entered into a foggy, unclear zone of violence. I still remember the intense guilt I felt about being a guest in a catastrophe, a guest who was allowed to leave at will because I lived somewhere else.

The war was already there, an intruder, something strange, foreign and insane, which had no justification to happen in that place and at that time. Back then, I kept asking people in the Donbas how all this could start, and always got different answers.

I think that the beginning of this war in the Donbas was one of the most mythologized moments for the people of Kyiv, precisely because it remained incomprehensible how such an event is born. At that time, in 2014, people in Kyiv said, "People from Donbas, those Ukrainian Putin-sympathizers, invited the war to our country." This alleged "invitation" has for some time been considered an explanation for how the absolutely impossible—war with Russia—suddenly became possible after all.

After I finished the phone call with my cousin, I paced around my apartment for a while. My head was absolutely blank, I had no idea what to do now. Then my phone rang again. One call followed the next, friends came forward with plans to escape, some called to make sure we were still alive. I quickly grew tired. I talked a lot, constantly repeating the words "the war." In between, I would look out the window and listen to see if the explosions were approaching. The view from the window was ordinary, but the sounds of the city were strangely muffled—no children yelling, no voices in the air.

Later, I went out and discovered an entirely new environment, an emptiness that I had never seen here, even on the most dangerous days of the Maidan protests.

Sometime later I heard that two children died from shelling in Kherson Oblast, in the south of the country, and that a total of 57 people died in the war today. The numbers turned into something very concrete, as if I had already lost someone myself. I felt angry at the whole world. I thought, this has been allowed to happen, it is a crime against everything human, against a great common space where we live and hope for a future.

I'm staying with my parents tonight. I've visited a bomb shelter next to the house, so I know where we'll all go when the shelling comes later.

The war has begun. It is after midnight. I will hardly be able to fall asleep, and there is no point in enumerating what has changed forever.