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Mariupol five years ago on this very day. Back then, my friends and I took some time off and just jumped in a car to spend two weeks traveling around Ukraine. Lviv, the Carpathians, Odesa, Kherson, the Black Sea… and, as fate would have it, Mariupol. We returned six years after graduating from university there and setting off into adult life. Mariupol genuinely amazed me back then: the city had developed incredibly over those years. The warm sea, clean and well-kept streets, trendy cafes and restaurants, pubs and parks, fountains and food courts, lawns, the lights of nightlife and youth. I barely recognized the dirty, deeply provincial city with few prospects where I had studied for five years, suffocating in the chemical smog of gigantic steelworks. The Drama Theater, the House with the Clock, the universities, the City Garden, “A Thousand Little Things”… Now it was a cozy, youthful seaside city, rapidly adopting almost every element of the lifestyle and comfort I had already grown accustomed to in the capital. The summer of 2021 was the best and happiest time Mariupol had ever known in its entire history. I was so impressed that, walking along those sunny avenues with my headphones on, I found myself wondering: maybe to hell with everything, maybe I should move back here, to my roots, to the places of my student youth, where you walked hand in hand with girls on dates, where you worked in a bookstore, and where you drank beer with the guys after classes and ran from the patrol police? And six months later, this happy city would burn alive to the ground in the flames of war, crushed into a bloody pulp under the tracks of tanks — and by a savage hatred coming from the bottomless abyss of darkness.