There are situations that no one has ever prepared us for. Situations we never asked for. And every time you think you’ve already seen all the horrors this world has to offer, life somehow throws something new at you. Right when things are already hard enough. In moments like these, sometimes there is no one around who can pull you out of it. And the only person who can do that is you. Every time I face something like this, when I feel like I definitely won’t have the strength to get through it this time, I start by telling myself: “We are only given what we can handle.” Sometimes this explanation makes me furious. Why can’t we just live and be happy? I’ve been thinking that perhaps, by the end of our lives, what matters is having more good moments than bad ones. We need to do more than grieve — we need to keep living, no matter what. I would even say — in spite of everything. And this applies even to the smallest things. I buy myself a dress and think, “What’s the point? To wear it while picking up rolls of fabric from the post office?” Then I stop myself and say, “For myself.” Lately, whenever I think about life before the war, it feels as though we’re now living in a black-and-white movie, desperately trying to bring some color back into it. I listen to my friends who have moved abroad, and I’m genuinely happy to hear that people still have such important things to think about as visiting a new restaurant that has just opened. That’s how life used to be for us before the war. Back in that bright, colorful world. And you know, I really don’t want us to forget how to enjoy such simple things. I don’t want us to reach the day when all of this is finally over, only to realize that we have to learn how to live all over again. I want to talk about new restaurants again, choose dresses, make plans for the weekend, and worry about completely ordinary, trivial things. But for now, I’ll keep trying to bring color into my black-and-white movie. Even if sometimes it’s just a new dress that I seemingly have nowhere to wear. Because I don’t want to look back one day and realize that the war took not only years of my life, but also the life itself that I kept putting off until later.