{"id":375,"date":"2026-06-25T12:19:04","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T12:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/daviddolganov.com\/?page_id=375"},"modified":"2026-06-25T12:21:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T12:21:08","slug":"wake-up-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/daviddolganov.com\/?page_id=375","title":{"rendered":"Preface"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-white-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-c9de53af8622498d9719c133420e39a0 wp-block-paragraph\">One day, my world fell. It collapsed \u2014 to knock me off my Path. I lost my way. I put on a stranger&#8217;s mask of lies. I learned to lie so well that I believed it myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-white-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-149b439340a84dc88dd96f519498953d wp-block-paragraph\">But the mask never sleeps. Inside it, the one who used to love the sun, mom, dad, family, laughter, this very world \u2014 is suffocating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-white-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-68997abe21c1c4462bb291c54644463f wp-block-paragraph\">I wrote these poems to *prokynutysia* \u2014 to wake up from drones, from falsehood, from acid love, from prayers that go unanswered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-white-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-3890c0d31b4079d0f839e5fa627b87b5 wp-block-paragraph\">In this book: war, God and His silence, demons, puppies in a basement, death, loneliness. And \u2014 against all odds \u2014 the will to live. Morning. A smile to the sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-white-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-68f78a207164ebe4b3b087496c67d7c1 wp-block-paragraph\">Life is not when the pain ends. It&#8217;s when you rise after the collapse and say: *I choose this dawn.*<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-white-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-76f2f3013df1298017d88f36a1464d3d wp-block-paragraph\">Read them out of order. The darkness here is real. And so is the light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-white-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-39dc9c6ba8fbb50cd36036aa21c9252b wp-block-paragraph\">*Zaporizhzhia \u2014 Kyiv \u2014 Odesa \u2014 Tashkent \u2014 2002\u20132026*<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One day, my world fell. It collapsed \u2014 to knock me off my Path. I lost my way. I put on a stranger&#8217;s mask of lies. I learned to lie so well that I believed it myself. But the mask never sleeps. Inside it, the one who used to love the sun, mom, dad, family, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-375","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daviddolganov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daviddolganov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daviddolganov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daviddolganov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daviddolganov.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=375"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/daviddolganov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":381,"href":"https:\/\/daviddolganov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/375\/revisions\/381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daviddolganov.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}