Paris, December 23, 2024,
Dear readers, dear readers,
On this Christmas Eve, I am in the emergency room with my son, who is sick. I think of my sister and her baby. I ask myself a thousand questions about life with an infant under the sirens, the constant attacks.
The last major offensive targeted the neighborhood where our university, the Alma Mater, is located. This is where we, our maternal grandmother, our parents, Sasha and I studied French linguistics. It was also in this neighborhood that I learned music, and that, as a young girl, I hung out at the café. Someone once told me that when you have memories somewhere, it's even harder to see the consequences of a missile in those places. I confirm: it’s heartbreaking. Discovering the windows of the entrance hall of the university broken, the stained glass windows and the rose window of the cathedral where I sang so many times, destroyed, the grand staircase of the business center near which we met with my friends, demolished…
In my heart these days, sadness and joy mix. It's my son's first Christmas, and I'm feeling the joy of this holiday season for the first time in a long time. I would like to share this with my family. I think of Sasha even more since I should have been there, in Kyiv, at the end of the year.
My trip was planned and planned down to the smallest detail but I canceled it: too hard for me to leave with my baby, despite the immense desire to see mine. I couldn't move past the fear and imagine my child amidst the sound of the attacks. We talked about it a lot with Sasha and she told me something that stuck with me: “Marian doesn't even wake up during the attacks, but I can't imagine how Zakary would react, he's not used to it. »
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