In 5th grade, I got a Nintendo 64.

My favorite game was GoldenEye 007. It’s a first-person shooter. I was James Bond. It was me against the Russians.

Babushka watched me play for weeks. Then one day she said:

“You’re shooting Russian soldiers in this game.”

I heard her but I wasn’t listening. I played dumb: “They’re Russian?” I said.

Babushka didn’t say anything. She just sat, watching me shoot the 64-bit polygons, the Russians, sometimes in the torso, sometimes in the chest or the shoulder or in the head. Sometimes in the neck. When they got shot in the neck, the soldiers clutched their throats and struggled, silently, crumpling to the ground and dying. And then they immediately disappeared. Death was very clean in GoldenEye, very neat.

Babushka watched this.

“So what?” I said. “We’re not Russian.”

My family lived in Kyiv for generations until 1989. Ukraine and Russia were still one country when we left. In 1986, when Chernobyl happened in Ukraine, millions of Russians came to aid.

“No, we’re not,” she said, “but Russians are still our people.”

“eto nashi lyudi,” she said. “these are our people.”

This never left me.

And now, I’m thinking about it more than ever. Now, confronted with images on tv of the grim brutality, the viciousness of war — for the Ukrainians and, of course, also for the Russians — the profound sacrifices being made by both sides in this colossal tragedy, this complete and utter fxcking waste of life:

I can’t stop thinking about it.