I went curtain shopping during a Kyiv air raid. And not because I’m ‘resilient’ | Diana Berg

We can’t count on tomorrow so it would be rational to own less. Yet we make our homes nicer, just to anchor ourselves in the here and nowI was standing in front of a locked basement door in a building in our neighbourhood, laughing, as Ukrainian air defence shot down drones directly above me. I had run into the first residential building I could reach, and I even took a photo of the locked door – a shelter, and the shelter locked – because I wanted to remember it. I was on my way to buy curtains.I hadn’t checked whether there was an alert before I left home. I had simply set out for the shop, 20 minutes away through our residential district, on foot. But somewhere along the way, things started exploding in the sky above me – and I was suddenly walking through a city under attack because I had decided that my windows needed new curtains. What the fuck was I laughing at? I should have been terrified, and I was. It was just that I still wanted the curtains, and the absurdity was hilarious.Diana Berg is a Ukrainian artist, writer and cultural manager from Mariupol, and the founder of Platform TU, an independent cultural initiative now operating in exile after Russia’s full-scale invasion Continue reading...