The first time the drone strikes intensified it was just after Thanksgiving, and I was already a bit depressed to have celebrated with Crimean Tatar food rather than turkey and cranberry sauce. That Friday night, like the one before, air alerts were on for hours. This time felt different. My roommate slept in the hallway (two sets of walls — away from windows — offer more protection from shrapnel than the bedroom). I slept in the walk-in closet. Per usual, the air alert was accompanied by a recording of Mark Hamill’s voice intoning from our phones: “Attention. Air Raid Alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter. Don’t be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness.” An avuncular Luke Skywalker in a city that seems surreal enough on its own. On Telegram channels the next day word spread that this was serious. Debris attested there had been a record number of Shahed drones: the largest attack since the full-scale invasion the year before. A kindergarten in my neighborhood was damaged. My phone chimed repeatedly — people I knew from college, from high school, friends of friends — so many acquaintances reached out to ask if I was alright. He did not.
There is something oddly clarifying — if frightening — about realizing that you might die and that still someone who just a few months ago used to say “I love you” will not break his silence. We’d been together for three and a half years.
When I was growing up, the people I respected most were activists, doctors, humanitarian workers, EMTs, and journalists. Specifically, ones who worked in war zones. I decided to become an aid worker. I think the reasoning is that 1) blood frightens me and 2) politics can be hard to parse, whereas as imperfect as it is (for many reasons, requiring a separate essay), humanitarian aid seemed the least morally objectionable choice. So that’s what I resolved to work on.
It is brutal work.
My first work overseas, in Sierra Leone, was difficult not because of anything particular about the place (it is lovely, Freetown is on the beach, and the people are very kind), or the medical risks (I speak from experience: typhoid and parasites are exactly as fun as you’d expect), but because I could see its poisonous effects on my relationship with my partner back home. That was what I found excruciating.
He wants to be an opera singer. He thinks that art gives life meaning the way I think people do. Opera-ambition doesn’t force people into war zones, but if it did he would go. He’d relish the opportunity to make that kind of sacrifice. I guess I can’t fault him for that.
We went all the time. Opera filled our relationship, and, as it was explained to me, ended it. When we matched, his Bumble noted that he was “studying philosophy” and that his backup plan was to become an opera singer. After he broke up with me — before he unmatched — I noticed that he had updated his profile to reflect that he was a “Philosopher” (he had received his PhD, but still) and that his backup plan was to be an opera “star.” I confess I found it almost charmingly anachronistic: the idea of an opera star in the Year of our Lord 2023. I say this with love; I too wish such a status still existed.
When he was a child he was a soloist in the Vienna Boys Choir. Initially I did not grasp the gravity of that fact. As I later learned, between the ages of ten and fourteen he toured the globe playing Gretel. He stayed in fancy hotels and when he and some other boys got up to mischief (legend tells they set toilet paper on fire and chucked it out the window of their hotel — the little dears) he noted with glee that because of his status as a soloist, unlike the other boys, he was spared expulsion. It was an odd origin tale, and no element more so than the accounts of obsessive fans. There was one in her mid-twenties from South Korea. She wrote him letters and bought him gifts, among them a Burberry sweater. He treasured it and when he outgrew the sweater his siblings back home fought over who would inherit it. He often pronounced that being a member of the chorus did not interest him (in contrast, he told me that I would make a cute “back-up singer”). Being quite literally in the limelight is a narcotic he has never kicked. Since then, he’s tended to date older women, often mother-fan hybrids. I have no interest in being his mother, and clearly I was not very adept at fandom. It might be that he first soured on me when that incapacity became clear.
Many things about the relationship were beautiful. Beyond the pleasure of having a joint household and simply enjoying his humor and companionship, I also thought we shared the most critical values. The beginning of our relationship was spent canvassing for the 2020 election — he always said he admired that despite my full time job, we would travel on the weekends to swing states together. I think I fell in love with him talking to registered Democrats in New Hampshire — he’s quite charming, and in his PhD dissertation, about oligarchy, he noted in the acknowledgments that I always brought him back to what mattered. We were aligned. In earlier days, when we still operated like a married couple, he encouraged me to go to Sierra Leone. When I heard nothing from job after job, he pushed me to apply to get a master’s — first in the US, then abroad, as it was a fraction of the cost. He paid for half of my degree and forgave the loan for my thirtieth birthday. Naively, I used to fantasize about eventually devoting our lives to some noble political movement together. I also don’t know anyone else who would want to spend New Year’s Eve seeing Rigoletto at the Met, retrieving our hiking backpacks from coat check, changing out of our finery, and catching MetroNorth to hike Breakneck Ridge at midnight. We popped the champagne cork into the Hudson and slept soundly in our tent.
I really did love him, but over the course of that final year it became obvious that I did not really like him. I suspect he induced my distaste on purpose. How else to explain the sudden, drastic proportions of narcissism? As I shuttled from hospital to clinic to sort out my parasites — it’s still unclear what type of parasites I had, and after being prescribed a double dose of expired drugs, I do hope I don’t drop dead unexpectedly one day from the damn things — he would complain about his Amtrak commute from Philadelphia (for his postdoc, studying philosophy) to New York (for his opera lessons). I became so weak at one point I thought I might faint walking outside to the work car and considered calling an ambulance. I didn’t have the $200 equivalent in Leones so I took a gamble and did not. I didn’t tell my mother I was sick in Sierra Leone because she would inevitably ask about symptoms, and shitting blood was also how she had found out she had colon cancer many years ago.
He said at one point in the spring that our phone calls were draining (he had pressing rehearsals for a Mozart opera — though not one of Mozart’s best, if I may point that out here). This surprised me as our phone calls rarely lasted longer than ten minutes and, well, he did know all about my symptoms. He’d pop up to sext when he felt like it and disappear for 24 hours after. Over Christmas, when I was back in the States, he had let slip that he wasn’t sure what exactly our time zone difference was.
I returned to the US in April after my father was moved to a long-term rest home. Already I was hanging on by a thread. Incidentally, in the three and a half years we were together, he had never met my father, whom I love very much and of whom I am protective. I never had a single school performance or track meet that my father did not attend. He fought to go to everything, even when events were kept from him in the midst of a nasty custody battle. When I applied to college and wrote my personal statement, he taught me to write as he edited it with me. He loves Gilbert & Sullivan and finds D.H. Lawrence deeply distasteful. He also loves to socialize but it drains him. I had spent a year as his caretaker during Covid.
I have said to several significant others that no one will meet my dad unless we are together for life. I had thought that that was true. And yet when my father was moved to the rest home, my then-boyfriend insisted on checking on him and bringing him a book and a Columbia t-shirt (where they had both been students, though my father had dropped out of college in the 60s, and my ex had completed a PhD). Seeing my father, even in a photo, with evident traces of dementia, holding up a Columbia fencing t-shirt, with a placid, vacant smile on his face — smiling at him, taking the photo, without me there — it was all too much.
A week later he broke up with me. He did it over the phone, while I was on a work trip in Tanzania, staying in a room with six beds, five other bodies, and no privacy. Holly Golightly put it well: “he’s not a regular rat, or even a super rat. Just a scared little mouse.”
We’d just spent a tender month over the holidays together, though it seemed he was unable to end things in person. He absolutely hated Philadelphia, though he told me in bewilderment that my company would make even a few years there nice. Over the phone shortly after, in contrast, he crisply relayed that he was no longer committed. It was a formal announcement, as if he were terminating a business contract. For someone who loved opera there was a jarring absence of emotion. His tone lacked vulnerability, a quality which makes the best tenors good.
He was often sexist in jest (like all manner of bigots, many men mistake joke-sexism for non-sexism). A favorite observation of his was how attractive sopranos are fragile. It struck me as a loss — some kind of emotional disability — that he did not realize that attractive men must be fragile too. Above all, the Amathia was striking.
And still I fought for him. I went back to him. Hours and $100 in long-distance calls (out of a monthly stipend of $600) calling Air Senegal and begging to use a flight credit reduced me to frantic delirium. After numerous chats on WhatsApp with Air Senegal in Sierra Leone and in Senegal itself (in French — it was maddening) I tracked down the Air Senegal office in downtown Freetown, which would only take cash. As instructed, I had changed all my remaining money from dollars to Leones to buy the flight. When I got to the office they told me they couldn’t book the ticket since I had already initiated it over the phone but also could not permit me to proceed with the online transaction. The poor woman in the office had to refuse my desperate, teary pleas for help — there was nothing she could do. Every time you change money you lose a bit and I was already working two to three jobs on the side to make my monthly $600 student loan payments. Sierra Leone is, generally speaking, a very nice place: when I left the office and walked into the street, shaking, tears streaming down my face, terrified I would be robbed of the equivalent of hundreds of dollars in a bag on my arm, several strangers asked me if I was alright and helped get me a keke home.
When I finally made it to New York in April we slept together several times in 24 hours. It seemed things had returned to normal.
First he sputtered that the distance that year was unbearable, and avoided eye contact. I talked to him as if he were a child. I told him we didn’t need a plan for next year — what was important was that we were together. His cow-like eyes were huge and glassy. Then he scooped me up and carried me off to the bedroom and things were as they always had been. He clung to me like a child. He begged me to come back to bed when I got up to wash my face and wanted to fall asleep holding hands as we always did. I was sure his resolve would collapse. I was wrong.
He insisted we remain broken up. This time, the reasoning was that he needed to be alone to pursue opera stardom, unfettered, anywhere it took him. For a while, I could not believe it. Surely if the crux of the problem was distance, I could fix it? I swore off field experience and promised I’d get a headquarters job wherever he went. Nothing worked; I remained jettisoned.
I could not eat or sleep or concentrate. I wondered if I were like Puccini’s Turnadot, self-protective and avoidant of love, or worse, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden, too frigid to love in an adult way, a way that he could feel. I was down to one meal a day when Prozac was salvifically prescribed.
I got a flight to France that fall through credit card points and stayed with a friend. I didn’t have health insurance in the United States and I needed a lot of work done: a dental cleaning, a tooth fixed, bloodwork, the gynecologist — things I had been avoiding for years. That’s where I was when I got the job in Ukraine. Though it sounds trite, my time here has made me more certain than any other experience that my life has been spent meaningfully. If anything happens to me, I will know that I tried to leave the world a better place than I found it.
Engaging with the larger world was a value we shared, though by then, I had already admitted to myself that this manifested in profoundly different ways. His family was always self-conscious about their class status. As a result, I suppose, he and his brother enjoyed quizzing me. I called it the Jeopardy treatment. They’d weave from English to French to German at the dinner table and monitor what I could follow. When I got my job in Sierra Leone, his brother offered congratulations, and immediately asked, “by the way, who is the President?” I successfully produced the requested factoid, but I am sure he asked precisely because he thought I couldn’t.
Even before the protracted Sierra Leone unraveling, I had my issues with my ex. For one, he often left me feeling a bit like Annie Hall. Like all white men with some connection to Brooklyn and a college education, he stressed with near-comic frequency that I ought to read Adorno. Very early on, before we said I love you (though perhaps I already had his keys, those he gave me within a couple months), he noted in jest that he would love to come home to see me weeping for him on his bed. Missing him. I suspect that on some level he sees his own life as an opera.
Multiple people suggested that he’d make a fine politician. Privately he resented that he had not been accepted to Harvard, like his brother. And to think of all those connections his brother neglected to make! The waste! He had elaborate frameworks to analyze his sibling relationships, including which siblings would need to die in order for another sibling to be happy. He hypothesized that all five of his siblings would need him gone. These conversations made me relieved to be an only child.
Loved ones listed these and other red flags in the litany of reasons to be grateful I was free, as if love can be rationalized that way. I could not understand it, and could not stop asking myself — and everyone else — why he had forced me from him. One friend said it seemed that he wanted to sacrifice everything on the altar of opera so that if he failed, it would not be because he had let anything or anyone get in his way. I believe he considers it a noble calling, the kind that makes life worth living. I was an unjustifiable indulgence, excision was necessary.
I do value beauty, but I could never live that way. Perhaps it is because I went to an extremely religious school as a child, but to me it feels wasteful, even though I no longer believe in a heaven and a hell. There is a part of me still — an inner, judgmental Protestant — that considers it frivolous.
In the fall I made a site visit close to the Dnipro river, just across from Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which is ten miles across on the opposite bank, in occupied Enerhodar. Colleagues and I joke that close to the front line the air alert blares after the bomb has already been dropped. I was nervous. But I believe people working on humanitarian emergencies should see them up close. If you don’t see the needs with your own eyes you have no right or capacity to shape the humanitarian response. People will tell you exactly what they need, but you have to ask them.
Because of martial law, schools without a functional bomb shelter were shut down at the beginning of the war. It takes an enormous toll on families: children, who should be socializing with their peers, women, who, without childcare, can no longer work, families overall under tremendous strain. When you see up close how much a community just wants its bomb shelter renovated so that its children can go back to school — what a return to some semblance of normal life during a war can mean — you really cannot imagine working on anything else ever again.
Around the holidays, the attacks on Kyiv increased. During one mass attack, I was sleeping when I heard what sounded like explosions. The noise was so loud I glanced out the window to see if it was in my courtyard. I looked at my phone, still no air alert, strange. And yet the BOOM, BOOM BOOM, BOOM, BOOM BOOM was incessant and unremitting. I became increasingly certain, air alert or not, I needed to take shelter. I ran to my roommate’s room and banged on her door to wake her up. We took refuge in the walk-in closet for shelter. From the middle of the night through the early morning we kept each other awake obsessively following different Ukrainian Telegram channels as the news came in, googling which neighborhoods in Kyiv were hit and their proximity to ours, trying to make one another laugh (and above all, to stay awake). Dark humor is a godsend in a war zone. The closet door against which I was leaning was shaking from the blasts, a peculiar feeling I will never forget. We wondered if things had taken a turn for the worse. I still am not entirely sure how close the closest hits were but I heard car alarms going off outside.
It’s not that I never miss him — I do — but in moments like that it’s obvious to me that what I’m doing does matter. Far more than music, and far more than maintaining a neat and comfortable life. More than anything.