Sasha-dann - Untitled

You keep promising

the sun the sky and all of the stars

to me

I’ll bring you the moonshine

you say

But I don’t want them

I just want this moment, nothing else

Promise me this moment

will always be ours

Promise me you’ll try to make it last

even if we both know it can’t

Promise me this memory

Promise me it will always be mine

To cherish

To love

To live

Promise me a world where I don’t have to

Print words onto my skin

Force them in

Just for them to stay

To not be forgotten

Promise me a world where these whispers

won’t ever die down

Where I don’t have to have your words

written on me in black

Just to remember in this life

We were once

Everything.

It’s weird to be here

but it’s weird to be anywhere else

this half happened and half didn’t

and I’m an imposter

of my own life

pretending I’m okay with this

pretending it will be fine, and it doesn’t matter

but it does

and I don’t belong to the future that I built

for myself

the person I am doesn’t belong there anymore

but I have nothing else

and it hurts because time moved on

without me

and I’ve missed so much, and I grieve

the life I didn’t get to live

and I sit in my room again and see

the ghost of me around

in the boards, notes, and posts stuck

still stuck around, from before

There is this special kind of hopelesness that is so specific to being a person from Eastern Europe that I cannot put into words and that is never really talked about on Tumblr because Tumblr doesn’t really care about Eastern Europeans and puts us in the same category as “those other European colonizers” despite the fact that most of us were too busy being oppressed ourselves to even dream about possibly colonizing anyone, much less actually doing it when we barely had any contact with the rest of the world for decades, didn’t have access to foreign media and if anyone knew languages it was probably Russian.

There is this kind of deep generational trauma that never really stopped and has been going and going and seems to be culminating now. It’s the kind of thing you don’t even notice, you are so used to it, and then one day, out of nowhere, it hits you in the face.

I’m only now realizing how much last year’s mass protests that I joined affected me. It’s been almost a year. And it’s only now starting to sink in how fucking traumatic that was and even now my first instinct is to rationalize it and second guess myself because ‘it wasn’t that bad’ and ‘we’ve all been through this’ and ‘you avoided being tear gassed, so what? you’re fine, stop being a crybaby!’. And it’s a culmination of events that started long before I was born, a cycle of oppression most Eastern European countries are so used to. My parents at my age were doing exactly the same thing. Protesting. On the streets. Trying to survive. The reasons for protesting might change a little, but ultimately it’s always about the right to live and be free. To stand against corrupt politicians. To fight with harmful propaganda.

There is something deeply isolating and hopeless about being from Eastern Europe on the Internet that seems to be so hyperfocused on the US and about being surrounded by american politics whenever we open a browser when our world is literally falling apart, you know?

I think a surprising amount of writers don’t realize that tragedies are supposed to be cathartic. They’re intended to result in a purging of emotion, a luxurious cry; the sorrow caused by a great tragedy is akin to fear caused by a good horror movie – it’s a “safe” sorrow, one that is actually satisfying to the audience. It can still be beautiful! It’s isn’t supposed to just be salting the earth so nothing can grow.

But that’s how you get grimdark: writers who don’t realize that they’re supposed to be doing something with the audience instead of to the audience.