I don’t even know if this is getting out. The signal flickers like a dying match and the cold eats batteries like it eats fingers. But I want someone to read this. Someone outside the mud and smoke.
We’ve been holding this trench for sixteen days. The same cratered road, the same blown-out church steeple in the distance, like a goddamn finger pointing nowhere. Supplies run low, and so does sleep. Most of us are half-dead already. You get used to it. Or you don’t, and your brain folds in.
But here’s the weird thing. The thing that’s keeping the guys upright, eyes scanning the wire, guns still steady? It’s not patriotism. It’s not the speeches, the flag, or even the thought of saving our home. It’s this rumour, this absolutely stupid, beautiful rumour.
They say there's a video. A woman, somewhere in the west, or maybe here, who knows, shitting. Not in a bathroom. Not in shame. In defiance. With full eye contact, apparently. Squatting in the open, staring down the camera like she’s daring the world to flinch. That’s it. No soundtrack. No hashtags. Just this raw, human moment.
And I swear to god, it’s passed around like sacred scripture. One guy says his brother saw it. Another says it got deleted from by a moderator but lives on a USB stick hidden in someone’s sock. Doesn’t matter if it’s real anymore. It feels real.
Because it’s not about the shit. It’s about the stare. The look on her face, how we imagine it, says “Yeah, this is the world now. And I’m still here.”
And maybe that’s all any of us want. Proof that somebody out there is still doing something stupid and human. That the world hasn’t gone fully grey yet. That someone, somewhere, still gives so little of a fuck, they’ll do something raw just to remind us we exist.
So yeah, we’re holding the line for a rumour. For a video that might not even exist. But that woman, real or not, is an icon in this trench.
And maybe when this is over, if it ever is, I’ll find her. Or someone like her. And I’ll say thanks.
Because sometimes, the weird shit is what keeps you alive. Slava Ukraini.