Israel Centeno

You came from a country where everything was wrong, invaded and at war with one much larger. You thought you could save your life by going far away, leaving behind violence, even the natural call of the homeland. But homeland—what is homeland? In the end, it always belongs to the dead. We are the same ones who flee, seeking refuge where everyone says there is peace, where violence exists only in cowboy films, mafia sagas, or Hollywood plots.

You found a different reality, yes, but one that seemed navigable: here there is no open war, you could return from work one afternoon, alone, take a bus. Just a few stations. You sit down, lower your head, and scroll through the messages on your phone. You do this every day. The bus doesn’t bother you. Routine disguises fatigue.

I try to imagine what you felt, Iryna. Poor girl—and I say “poor” not as insult but because it pains me to call you so. The very thought pierces me: just a few seconds. You realized everything was already in motion, that a shadow rose behind you. And shadows have no weight. Only the determination of hate. Or of absurdity. Or of a destiny dictated by causes beyond sense.

You felt the stab and folded into yourself, as if to avoid a second blow. But it was precise, like the thrust of a matador. Other passengers saw and turned away. They shrank back, busying themselves as if evil would not touch them. They did not help you. The man had time to strip off his shirt soaked in your blood, toss it onto a seat, and flee as if nothing had happened.

Those of us who saw the video saw the drops of your life scattered on the bus floor. We saw the passengers frozen, ashamed, inhibited by fear. What you felt in those seconds as life left you—we will never know. We cannot pretend that instead of horror you felt confusion. It was horror pure, total, concentrated. It was a determination aimed at your very existence.

You would never know that this man should never have been there. You would never know that, somehow—as always—he would be justified: because there is violence, because there is racism, because there is injustice. And then the intolerable happens: the victim dissolves, becomes a footnote, a statistic, a silence. The aggressor occupies the center of the narrative, and your name, Iryna, is erased. Erased in the chronicle, erased in the speeches, erased even in the memory of those who excuse themselves by saying evil “had its causes.”

But you were not a cause, not a concept, not a symbol: you were life. And when life is erased, it condemns us all to the same shadow that overtook you.

How alone you must have felt, Iryna. Disconnected from everyone, already outside every human bond. What desolation in those few moments that stole your future on this earth, far from your own.