She stood and watched as he throws over his shoulder his worn out tactical backpack, and listened the beat of her heart. The heart that from this minute started counting not the moments of her life but the time of separation. What was in her soul? Her vulnerability to pain, the suppressed, unbearable, forbidden desire to call out his name? I don’t know…

I know what was in his - the unwillingness to turn around and the strong desire to win and live so that one day he could come back. Come back to the one, for which it is worth going through fire and pain, tragedy and destruction, frustration and fatigue, to go through the undeclared and from that, even more brutal war, and survive. She was squeezing in her hand his “dog tag.” Squeezed so hard that it seemed that on her palm will be forever engraved: UVC RS, nickname “Buk”, IV + the Tryzub symbol. The camouflaged car with a red-black flag was dissapearing into the morning mist.

I don’t know who she is. I don’t know whether she shares his right views, don’t know how she explains his decision to go fight as a volunteer, and what the metal token means to her, a copy of which was around his neck - symbol of deep and enduring faith in their country or an amulet of dreamful women’s fate. I only know that in the early morning, tired from insomnia, she will still be squeezing it while writing on the misted, from her breath, glass of the window:

“I cannot live without him. Just will not breath.”

I don’t know who she is. I don’t know what kind of books and flowers she likes, what kind of poems and melodies live in her room, what she likes more - walk barefoot, making art-prints from the shimmering display of blooming chestnuts in puddles, or clicking the tremolo with her high heels on the marble floor of the university halls. I only know that her nickname is “The Main Character” and that after meeting him, she wrote, “One day, you will meet that one, who will turn your life upside down. He will divide it into two pieces - before and after. And nothing will be the same. Everything will change. You will change…”

I don’t know what kind of dreams she sees or what she takes pictures of on her old Nikon - the lights of big cities or a lace with sea pebbles on empty beaches. Or what is in her box of secrets - paper cranes that were a gift from her older sister or children drawings drawn by her little brother, or maybe a letter from her father that begins with “To my little princess…”

I only know that she wears silver earrings shaped as angel wings, she has ‘believe’ written in a renaissance font on her wrist, and after saying goodbye to him, she will write, “What are kilometers and time to us when even this ruthless and greedy war that does not take pieces apart but takes awat all at once...a war, that easily takes away life, is not able to take love away.”

I don’t know she is is…

I only know that she is - the main character.

And maybe that is all that I need to know about her.