UKRAINE

Hello Dream,

It’s me, Besa. I’m writing to you with a trembling pen and a heavy heart. Not because I’ve lost faith in you—no, never that—but because I need you to hear me, feel me, respond to the ache that won’t quiet inside my chest. I need to speak to you, Dream, as only a writer can, from the place where words bleed truth, from the place where silence grows too loud.

What is happening in Ukraine is not a headline. It is not a statistic or a map shaded in red. It is a child’s name no longer spoken at bedtime. It is a mother pressing her body over her baby’s in a subway tunnel, whispering lullabies into terror. It is a school turned to ash. It is a girl cradling her textbook as she walks past tanks. It is the soft sob of a boy who can’t remember the smell of his grandmother’s cooking.

Dream, how can we sleep?

The children are not just losing their homes—they are losing their futures. Displaced and frightened, their classrooms are now borderlines. Their backpacks, if they still carry them, are filled with trauma and uncertainty. These children, once building castles from blocks and hope, are now learning the anatomy of fear. They are learning sirens before they learn symphonies. Many won’t return to school. Many won’t return at all.

And the women—O Dream, the women.

They are the weavers of survival, holding broken families together with fraying threads. They are fleeing with babies in their arms, only to face exploitation at borders, or silence in shelters. Their rights, once fragile progress, now crumble like dust under boots of war. Where there was once the promise of equality, there is now the echo of regression—employment lost, voices muted, dreams deferred.

Dream, I beg you—how much longer must a girl’s worth be weighed against the sound of artillery? How much more can they carry before the world notices their breaking? How many women must cry out before you wake?

This war is not just a geopolitical wound. It is a poem torn apart before it was read. It is the shattering of lullabies, the erasure of childhood, the dimming of light in eyes too young to understand such darkness.

I ask you now, Dream, with the soul of every child buried too soon, with the breath of every mother shaking in fear: when will this end?

When will we craft a world where women are safe, where children are free to learn, laugh, and sleep without sirens?

I am only a writer, Dream. But I am also a mother in spirit, a sister in solidarity, a human in mourning.

And I cry out to you not with ink, but with ache:
Stop. Please. Stop.

Let this war end. Let these children come home. Let the women breathe. Let us build something worthy of their courage.

Dream, if you are still out there—wake up. We need you more than ever.

With every piece of my heart,
Besa