History's Quiet Dread

I wrote a piece about a year ago. I never expected I would write it again.

About an hour later, my legs are carrying me home from a crowded Old Town Square. I can’t help but think: is this how people felt? Back in ’45. Back in ’68. Back in ’89. “The undying fear for life, the doom of repeating the same mistakes.” I’m quoting myself there—words from late January ’25, and I mean the year, not the day.

If I felt only a breeze on my skin back then, I’m standing in a swirling, freezing tornado now.

Weirdly enough, being emotional while also feeling a swelling rage has become a new standard these days. Suddenly, I sympathise with burning piles of fiction books and broken pledges—smoking ashes, simple lines and pages. Voices in the back of my head scream at the Soldiers of Death: what traumatised you? Was your ego crushed in high school? Or are you just sick in the head?

They tell us to stay focused. Keep studying. Keep working. Keep living. While bullet after bullet is being paid to the east and to the west. The world feels like it’s on the edge of falling once again—slipping back into its doom. And I don’t mean the new Marvel movie. Far from it.

How privileged it feels to travel by train and think of the warm, calm place I call home. Enjoying every second, every minute—until it’s the 1930s again.

A revival to the left, an empire to the right. Old uniforms with new slogans. History being written once more where I live, in ink that never really dried.

Selfish politicians.
Arrogant kids playing with numbers and words on paper.
Red buttons waiting to be pushed.

Is this the inheritance?
Is this the test we were promised but never agreed to take?
Are all animals equal—or are some more equal than others?
Do we braid our hair carefully, or keep our heads low?

The train arrives on time. It always does. Doors open, doors close, and the world pretends this is proof of stability. Timetables still work, coffee is still warm, and the announcements are calm, almost kind. Order survives longer than truth.

Outside the windows, the landscape passes like a rehearsal. Fields, houses, stations with names we learned in school—names that have already been footnotes once before. Nothing looks dangerous. That’s the trick.

People scroll. People laugh. Someone complains about the signal. Someone else talks about exams, rent, the future—as if the future hasn’t already started negotiating its terms without us. As if history sends invitations.

Protests gather the way clouds do. Slowly at first, almost politely. A few voices, a few signs, a few bodies refusing to stay separate. Streets remember what feet are for. Squares fill not with anger alone, but with breath—thousands of lungs deciding to work together.

And still, the voices from above say: calm down. Be reasonable. Don’t exaggerate. They say this every time. They said it while books burned, while borders closed, while trains went not toward home but away from it. They say it now, because calm is cheaper than courage.

I watch my reflection in the darkened window. I look ordinary. That’s how it always starts. Ordinary people, living ordinary days, slowly learning which words to swallow and which thoughts to fold small enough to carry unnoticed.

This is how the test arrives. Not with sirens at first, but with silence where answers should be. With jokes that aren’t funny anymore. With the quiet understanding that some things are suddenly safer not to say.

The train keeps moving. So do we. For now.

The square doesn’t shout at first. It listens.

Cobblestones worn smooth by centuries of waiting. Façades that have seen crowns, tanks, keys raised in winter. Old Town Square knows the sound of celebration. It knows the sound of warning, too.

People arrive in layers—scarves, flags, cardboard signs bent by the wind. Someone brought a whistle. Someone brought a child. Someone brought a memory they never asked to inherit. The crowd grows the way a thought does: quietly, insistently, until it can’t be ignored.

No one agrees on everything. That isn’t the point. Bodies are here together, refusing the comfort of private fear. For a moment, the city breathes as one organism.

Words rise, echo, vanish. What stays are the small things: hands clasped too tightly, candles guarding their flames, a stranger offering tea. Resistance doesn’t look heroic up close. It looks tired. Cold. Human.

Nearby, offices stay lit. Papers are signed. Numbers adjusted. Words chosen carefully, like gloves, to avoid fingerprints. The distance between the square and the desks has always been shorter than it seems.

When it ends, no one leaves victorious. People drift—back to trams, kitchens, homework, night shifts. Back to normal time. But the square remembers. It always does.

Later, on the train home, warmth returns too easily. That’s when the fear sharpens—not of what is happening, but of how quickly it could become familiar. How easily tomorrow could ask us to speak softer, stand straighter, remember less.

History isn’t knocking anymore.
It’s sitting beside us, asking where we’re getting off.