Nothing new.

I can't believe this is happening to us.

I pretend to have drawers in my head, and I try to keep the one that contains the most painful stuff way back, but it keeps trying to spill open.

Before I forget, thank you all for your support. I really, really value it.

Mama has been to a homeless shelter, at the train station (where she discovered that the police weren't looking for my father, that they didn't have any info on him), at the Botanical Garden, and at two hospitals on the Left Bank, which she again searched thoroughly, every floor, every room. She returned home around 11 pm.

With Marta, I walked around the area where papa used to live as a child - Mala Zhytomyrska, School #25 by St. Andrew's Church.

On my own, around 8 pm, I went to the area near the Botanical Garden and walked there, looking into most of the backyards and other off-the-road places. At the Botanical Garden, I talked to a guard, a very nice young man who drives a moped around the place even at night. He had no idea there was a search going on - which again shows that the police are idle. He said there was also a night guard who strolled the territory with a dog, and it probably means that papa is not there, or else they would have found him in the past five days. That's a relief, I guess, but there's still no way to be sure.

Mama called a family friend today, who was shocked and all, of course, but who also called back later and told mama this weird story: after the initial conversation, she went to see a neighbor whose son, a college student, had been missing for two months and who was found just yesterday, after his mother saw his picture on the Svidok show on NTN, the same one that had papa's info (when our friend showed her my papa's picture, she recognized him). It turned out that her son had been in a car accident, had a surgery, survived, but couldn't be identified because he didn't remember a thing about himself.

Why they didn't manage to locate him through 003 or 272-0672 (which we continue to call religiously) is anyone's guess - but if this is because some hospitals don't bother supplying info on their emergency and unidentified patients to those services, then, possibly, my mother is doing the right thing when she's checking some of Kyiv's hospitals on her own.

It's 2:30 am and a terrible thunderstorm is raging outside the window. My poor father, I so hope he is safe and warm now somewhere...