passage

the staying is always worse, once you've decided to leave.

that the night bus to Sarajevo, though, seemed to have been cancelled left us with no option but to take our sacks of mushrooms and mikans home and cook under the deadline of a gathering gathering in the apartment. an appearance ought to have been made thereat, but it's hard to assess actions and their relative consequences—or, indeed, to do anything, except hide, slipping in and out of consciousness—when the music pounds through the night and the floorboards, when the gunshots mix with bursts of colour-dimmed light. all this, echoing in alleyways, reverberating above a city that could not be left because the fire out on the open roads, in the mountains, could tear through rubber and glass, could injure.

not for anyone else to take on the sensitivity to noises that sits between the ears of one who never lived through it, but that the war would be too much with us in ways that otherwise deafen—i hope, too, for a new year.