There’s a category of people in Ukraine who, even now, have no idea what unimaginably terrible times we are living in, so they just keep finding reasons to be happy.
One such young boy passed by me recently while I was dragging my miserable existence down the street.
It was dirty, slushy, wet, snowy, and icy all at once. Dark and cold, empty, meaningless, and even the generators were humming in a somehow indifferent way, as if they weren’t generating anything at all but only making noise for appearances, so they wouldn’t be mobilized to actually do something serious.
And suddenly this boy shouted out joyfully—joyful, brazen, loud, and utterly genuine:
“Mom, today was the best day of my life!”
Can you imagine?
Yes, he was walking with his mother, and he looked no older than five years. But that didn’t diminish what he said.
I would have been far less surprised if I’d heard, “Mom, I’m the Antichrist!”—and seen the depths of hell opening up (who knows what could open up, what hasn’t already, we’re no longer surprised by anything).
The day itself was completely ordinary, boringly awful, I swear!
But the audacious little boy kept shouting: “The best! Mommy, this is the best day of my life!”
And the adult part of me mockingly commented in my mind:
“Oh, what could he possibly have seen in his life, this little runt? Probably got a red toy car today, or a white one, or maybe a red-haired girl smiled at him and shared some juice in kindergarten—what nonsense!”
But the other part of me, the lighthearted, good part, really, really wanted to catch up with this boy and ask him, in excruciating detail, how exactly his day had gone.
Then I could have recreated it—and felt that joy too.
What would it take? Maybe the secret is in a special jelly, in semolina porridge without lumps, in tights that don’t itch your legs? Or the hat should be tied under the chin but not too tightly, and the mittens dangling on little strings sewn to the sleeves, and the paints smeared directly on paper with your hands, without those boring brushes and cups of water? Or rolling in the snow, squealing from the cold on your neck, or barking at passersby pretending you’ve forgotten how to talk, or holding your breath until your head spins and your vision darkens and you feel a little—almost dead, or digging up a sleepy winter worm under a tree and eating it “pretend” so everyone around screams in horror…
And you wouldn’t even need to learn this science from scratch. You’d just have to remember, right?
We all knew how once, like that boy.
In short, I want a “Best Day of My Life” too. I really need it. We all really need it. And soon!
It can’t be possible that it’s already gone, can it?
And if it has passed, he can’t be the only one in life. No. At five, I definitely knew that even if today was the “Best Day of My Life,” the day after tomorrow could be even better. And then again, and again, and again…
Well, at least I remember that.
