The Day the Music Did Not Die

I do not remember the first time I heard the song American Pie.

I only remember what it does to me now.

I hear a man singing about the day his country’s music died. About a place he loved turning into a place he no longer recognized, or a loss that did not need to be explained because the people who lived inside it already knew.

He did not have to footnote the grief.

American Pie by Don McLean ℗1971 Capitol Records, LLC

I am writing this from a country being bombed by another country that wants us erased. As I tell you almost to exhaustion, I wake up in a place where missiles have become part of the weather, where the sky can interrupt both your coffee and your attempt to remain normal at the same time.

Ukraine is not dying, that is what I kept telling myself.

We are resisting because we have no other choice, and somewhere along the way the world began to see courage in us. Before we realized it, we became a story of pride and inspiration, one that people far from here placed on posters and profile pictures.

So why did this American song keep finding me here?

Can music save your mortal soul?

I was hearing my own fear inside it, the fear that a country can survive and still begin to lose the part of itself that makes it home.

A country can be alive and still be in danger of losing its music.

Exhaustion can take it away.

It comes from the small humiliations of survival and from the anger that grows when the war lasts too long, even as people far away write to us and remind us that they have not forgotten.

The loss I hear in that song unfolded so gradually that people could argue about whether it was happening at all.

Ukraine is brave, yes. But we are also tired people in apartments with cracked windows. We misunderstand each other, lose patience, wake up heavy, and still have to continue.

The war did not turn us into saints. It revealed what was already inside us, then went to work changing it.

You are not at war in America, but you know something about waking up in a place that no longer answers to its own name.

You know what it is to watch cruelty performed in public and hear it called strength.

This is when the proud story usually leaves out. The border is only one place where a country is saved.

The rest happens in places no drone can photograph.

In the kitchen after a bad night.

In the moment you could become cruel, and you do not.

I think this is where a country either keeps its music or loses it.

An army holds a border. The life behind it depends on people who are already tired, and nobody can order them to preserve it.

They carry it in memory and in the decision to protect the last of their humanity when things around them makes that decision look foolish.

I hear a man returning to the place where music once lived, only to discover that the music wouldn’t play.

A country that is losing itself from within.

I am writing from a country fighting with everything it has to keep its own.

And I no longer think that song belongs only to America in 1971.

It is asking whether the music is gone.

Or whether some of us are still carrying it.

—Viktor

🇺🇦🇺🇸

This line and these words live only if they’re carried. Share them with someone who matters to you, and subscribe to keep them alive.

Share Freedom Line by Viktor Kravchuk 🇺🇦🇺🇸