That Spring

I remember that March when Putin moved troops into Crimea and everyone online felt the weight suddenly shift. The debates started immediately—sovereignty, international law, what the US would actually do about it. VICE had cameras on the ground at the Black Sea, showing actual soldiers and checkpoints instead of just anchors narrating their panic. For a few days it seemed like we were standing at the edge of something genuinely catastrophic.

Then at some point it just faded. Not the crisis itself—that stayed, obviously, it’s still there—but the urgency dissolved. The dread became background noise. I stopped refreshing the news every hour. The moment passed into history. Which is maybe its own kind of apocalypse, watching something that felt world-ending become normal, become something people stop paying attention to.

That’s how it works though, isn’t it. We hold our breath for a few days and then we go back to our lives.