‘I sent you a news article. You should probably skim through it.’
He pauses. ‘No need to read the whole thing, but it’s probably good to be aware of a few things.’

I look up from the pile of dishes in the sink. Through the kitchen window, the sunrise is breaking the sky into shades of red.

He searches my face and looks at me with that half-smile and I know – I know – what he means.

And he knows – he knows that I have an aversion to keeping up with the mess that is this world we live in. I do not want to know, and I put in a dedicated effort to keep my ignorance safe.
It might look like an attempt to put my head in the sand. To choose to be foolishly oblivious to the fact that the world is going up in smoke. Which it is.

Or it might be that my own world is heavy with smoke and I’m simply saturated with it. Maybe I’m aware of the smoke I’m in, and these four walls that make up my life sometimes have to close in, so I can try to put out fires of my own doing – let alone the world’s.

Because the fires inside these four walls make headlines of their own. Not the type that go viral, but the type that burn quietly. Those headlines I know well.

And still, I know this too.

When you grow up in the world that was Eastern Europe in the ‘90s, where every headline could be summed up in one word – unrest – you learn that this is the state of the world. You learn that when the TV is always on, the headlines are always streaming the next sight of smoke, even smoke from buildings you once walked through.

This unrest doesn’t interrupt your life.
It becomes the backdrop of it.

And when that becomes the background noise of your childhood, you don’t pause and wonder if the world is a safe place.

You learn early that it isn’t.
And in a strange way, that truth is freeing.

Freeing because you know full well that this world might look like it’s racing forward at staggering speeds, tens of thousands of miles per hour. But really, truth is, it’s only falling in circles. And it’s been doing that since the beginning. Since that day a few choices were made in a garden. The same kind of choices I keep making, the ones that create smoke of their own.

And so, yes. I skim the article he sends. Because ignorance might be bliss, but it’s still ignorance.

Then I go back to the stove someone left on – again – and try very hard to not add any more smoke of my own.

Because the world burns loudly.
But our homes do so quietly.

And the TV still only turns on for movie nights and the occasional group game of Mario Kart. Because if you focus too much on how this world goes round and round and never seems to get anywhere, you might miss what that same circular motion gives us: breathtaking sunrises and sunsets. And the millions of moments in between.

The kind that find you standing at a sink full of dishes, watching the sky catch fire in the window.