17 years.
It was morning, around five o'clock. I woke up due to a quiet and unknown hum outside the window. I was not at home, I was spending time with friends. I woke up after the first explosion, Sever woke up after the second (*local name of the city of Severodonetsk). My mother immediately started calling me. The first thing she said to me was: “Go home. Quickly". Back then I only understood as much as my young brain could grasp. Scary, fast, loud, no connection, no internet. There were only adults on the streets, they went to collect water, because it had gone out already.
Every day there was just a huge misunderstanding, then I tried to figure out why the whole of Ukraine calls us "Donbas separs", because of what is Lysychansk suffering, why Luhansk, why the referendum, why, why, why?... Yes, I was at home in 2014-2015 .
I remember the blackout. It is when they turn off the lights throughout the city, because at 7 pm they shell Lysik (*local name of the city of Lysychansk). It was all strange to me then. I saw bombs flying over this city from my balcony. My mother says that I cried and asked: "Why are you doing this to the Lysychansk people?" I can’t remember. It was difficult. 
I remember the absence of connection. A point where you really cannot know or find out where a person is because any signal was blocked.
I remember VK (t.n. Russian social media, smth like Facebook), which at that time still had chat rooms where they wrote about the state of events. How I tried to catch at least some Internet connection to find out where they were shooting.
One time I felt like a small and defenseless animal. I walked to the store, and when I went out, I was struck by the fact that the people nearby, all like one, were looking at the sky in silence. I looked up too - there was a plane. It dropped something, and that something hung in the sky.
My legs just wouldn’t obey, my head told me to run, I wanted to cry, I felt sick from fear.
I remember the tricolor over the city hall. But I can't say for sure what it was, this event was similar to a protest. This rag was then torn off, then hung back again.
I remember Lenin. When I heard from my childhood that it was better "back then", and now you see him knocked to the ground. I did not understand then how I felt. I was uneasy on a constant basis. Old people said: "What are you doing?", and young people followed the path of Ukraine.
Most of all, I hated rain with thunder. When the weather was like this, it was the scariest thing. Those animals that were shooting learned to mask the shellings under the roar of thunder.
At first you don't pay attention, and then you start counting the seconds in your head. The only time I heard the sound of a rocket was in the evening. First you see a red speck in the sky and hear a whistle, and then you run, run away.
I couldn't do anything, I wanted to be a superhero to destroy all this abomination at once. I just wanted to live in my Ukrainian Sever. And so I lived.