Morgan

And then came that evening — the one when, in just three hours, I managed to watch three movies about great love, eat all the popcorn, and cry at a cat food commercial. That’s when I realized: enough is enough! It was time to take fate into my own hands. If love wasn’t going to find me on its own, I’d go find it — with a clear plan, a timer, notes, a Google Calendar, and possibly a small panic attack every three days. I declared war on loneliness. And, as practice showed, in this war the first casualties were my nerves, my wallet… and my dignity.

If this is my last dawn—let it spill gold over my native steppe. Let the wind carry the scent of wormwood and the distant song of larks; let the trumpets call not to death but to honor, and let my brothers remember me by the blaze of a campfire and in a Cossack duma. I lived so that there would be no place for slavery in my life. I led the Cossacks where the enemy deemed the way barred; with cunning I broke his strength, saved those whom the world had already written off, and drank a shot with the enemy to hear his secrets. I loved… yes, even amid the thunder of cannons my heart kept her voice. But freedom was my bride—and for her I stand here today, facing the bullet. When the shot rings out—I will not fall. Song will lift me, and I will go on across the steppe, where under the sky ...