Mykhailo (Larysa's student), Zaporizhzhia region, 17.06.22

On the morning of February 24th, I woke up at 5 a.m. because of the explosion. Knowing that there are multiple granite quarries close by our village, I was not too scared because I have been hearing such explosions for the entirety of my conscious life. After two hours, as I was not expecting anything unusual, I went to make breakfast and get ready for work.
After making breakfast and brewing some coffee, I turned on the TV as a matter of habit to watch the morning news. I froze from what I was seeing. The footage of missile attacks on Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other cities threw me into a stupor. I immediately ran to wake up my parents who were still asleep, shouting that the war had started.
I started walking to work to the sounds of shelling. At work, everyone else was also in a stupor. Nobody understood what was going on. Military helicopters were flying right above our heads and there was scary footage of the enemy’s military equipment movement on the news–something was going on around us. We did not know how we were supposed to work and what we were supposed to do as we depended on the logistics of the delivery chains. Ultimately, we were told to go home during lunch time.
On the next day, all of us, the 70 workers of the container terminal, were given our salaries and let go for an undetermined amount of time. I was very sad to leave work and especially the team which I liked a lot. All of my following plans for life were very vague and not very important.
The process of realization of what was going on lasted for about two weeks for me, it was only by mid-March that I could start perceiving the war as reality and not as some kind of a nightmare. And then there were photos from Mariupol, Bucha, and Irpin, looking at which I realized that my problems were not problems at all. I had to fully rethink my values and learn to enjoy ordinary things like an evening walk with friends or just a beautiful starry quiet sky. Yes, it was scary sometimes when I heard the sounds of missiles and was expecting it to explode. Those five seconds in between realizing that the explosion was happening and the expectation of it, those were the longest five seconds of my life. When you are holding your breath and begging the Universe, fate, and all of the gods for it to not hit your home, and then after the explosion you finally exhale while looking around and realizing that everything is standing in place, your home is standing in place.
Thankfully in [...], there were only a few times when the city was hit over the span of the war, the city did not experience any significant destruction. But even that, and especially the photos from other regions where the situation was, is just horrifying. It was enough for me to rethink my life and values, this was enough for me to change forever.