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 now

I 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