I took a nice long walk through the gentrifying neighbourhoods, from the Village all the way to the Atwater market, where I was meeting my friend Akina. It was gently raining, the terraces were full and the early fall in Montreal always makes me feel special. It feels like something good is just around the corner. I was listening to Tomasz Jerdowsky’s Swimming in the Dark – a tender novel that feels like one’s own heartbeat.

Later, as we were walking along the canal, Akina asked if I was still with my husband. I remember you telling me that you wanted to leave him, she said. I looked at her, surprised, unexpectedly happy that she remembered. I told you I wanted to be single, I said, you were the first person I ever admitted this to.

I remember it very clearly. Akina was pregnant, so it was three years ago. We met at a cafe. I brought her a book as a gift. Kenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. It’s not that I think that you’ll be doing nothing, I said, but your relationship with time will change. And besides, it is a really good book. We must have talked about relationships. She must have asked me how I felt about mine. I said, in a longer term, I see myself single. I don’t want to be with my husband. I don’t want to be with anyone. Just my kids. I remember it so vividly, because it was the first time I said it out loud.

Things come to an end. Good things and not so good things. Sometimes they need to be accompanied to their end, gently. September always makes me feel like things are ending and beginning. It was around this same time that I’d left my home nineteen years ago. I remember vividly that it was also raining.

Kyiv has been pounded by missiles and jet-powered killer drones

For six straight days and nights.

I wrote to my oldest friend

How are you? Are you holding on?

She sent me her address. She wrote

After the victory, please come visit.

After the victory, I, who never saw a bomb shelter in my life

Who never heard the sound of a shahed piercing the sky,

I, who left too early and stayed away for too long,

Will fall on the earth and press it to my face,

Just as my grandmother must have done, when she survived the famine,

Just as my other grandmother surely did, after she came back home from nazi slavery,

At the end of that other war.

Then I’ll do something neither of them could ever do:

I’ll buy a plain ticket,

I’ll fly over the ocean,

I will come back home,

And, listen to me, you, the gods of this fucking war,

I will see my friend again,

Whose name is Victoria.

Two days ago I woke up at four in the morning, somewhere between a night terror and a panic attack. I’ve been sleeping badly lately. I’ve been feeling powerless and hopeless and so so angry about it. When I woke up at four in the morning, I heard an inner voice speaking to me with clarity that it can only have in such ungodly hour. It said “You can’t have an existential crisis. You can’t fall apart.” Ok, I replied, I won’t.

But it’s easier said than done. My last existential crisis happened this morning at a work meeting. I am one of these animals that tries to look bigger when it feels unsafe. I speak too much, I debate, I try to be heard, my voice goes into a high pitch. I hate myself afterwards. As I was busy hating myself with a post-meeting hate, I saw this poem in my emails. An immediate answer.

I went to a pharmacy around noon. As I was walking back, it was cloudy but not raining, there was a sudden light, a crackle of electricity and then a very loud bang – a lightning just there. I ducked and screamed before I realised what I was doing.

I had an introduction call with a coach today. I love the idea of getting a coach, although I do not feel important enough to have one. There was a framed painting on a shelf behind the coach: a blue surface of a public pool, as if seen from above, with people swimming in it. I kept thinking: how can it be? I’ve been obsessed with an idea to draw a public pool from above for months, but never got to it. How can the picture that’s been living in my head all this time find itself in this woman’s living space. It felt surreal, but everything today feels surreal. Like a portal to somewhere, but where to?

When my day ended, I biked to the public pool. I’ve only swam for about ten minutes or so in that poignantly blue water, when there was a thunder and we had to leave the pool. On my way back I felt no frustration- how unusual for me. I realized that even ten minutes in water were enough to wash away whatever I needed to wash myself off.

Then in the evening Tatiana wrote that tonight was a full moon and an eclipse and somehow it all fell into place: the water, the portals, the feeling that something is happening just beyond my reach – the universe is rearranging itself for whatever comes next.

Letting go sucks, but with every thing I let go of, I feel a little lighter. I was forced to let go of my fitness regimen, of my perfectionism, of my idea of a good summer vacation, of my pride, of my career expectations. I fought as hard as I could, but I have to admit that once the wave of disappointment and anxiety passes, I feel gratitude. This freedom is hard-won and I wouldn’t return to being an eternally unsatisfied overachiever.

After days like today, I want to remember that

How I feel is a choice

What matters is a choice

Which burdens I carry is a choice

It is always possible to put them down

Forget them under a you seat on the bus

And walk away light

Ride a bike to an ice cream shop

And on to a luminous pond

Inhabited by a hundred little green frogs

And a turtle that may already be dead

If she died, oh what a life she lived

And in what a beautiful place she rests,

Slowly decomposing into water.

How quickly people give up on summer. It’s been only a few rainy days and a few nights with temperature dipping to 15 degrees and already I am the only person on my morning bus dressed in a summer skirt and open-toe sandals. You have to resist, I want to tell I’ll the others in their rain coats and soft plaid « cool morning in a chalet » jackets , winter will come soon and it will be so long, we will despair before we see the other side. But for now, you must resist.

I am reading Daniel Kehlmann’s Lichtspiel (Lightplay, translated into English as The Director) and it makes we endlessly sad.

I saw a beautiful thing today. At a playground near the soccer field where my son is practicing with his little league. A woman came to the playground. She looked in her thirties, maybe early forties, very fit. She was alone, without a child. She moved purposefully towards the swings, chose the middle one, threw her phone on the soft ground covered with wood chips and started swinging. She was swinging like a child, with purpose and energy, tossing her head back, closing her eyes, moving her muscular legs back and forth. She flew as high as the swing could go, then abruptly stopped, picked up her phone and walked away. It was the manner in which she dropped her phone, as if shrugging off her adulthood and the way she was swinging, as if on a mission, that made me watch her in wonder. How I love these beautiful strangers.

Summer Solstice with its golden hour, its beautifully long shadows, its mixed aromas of rain and withering peonies, its taste of magic. It’s only two days until the end of school, the caravans are adventure-ready at the end of driveways. Ice-cream parlours, public pools, open-air cinemas – all this summer treasure waiting for us, still untouched. Raspberries. Blueberries. Whales. Sea waves. Books. How can a person be so happy…

I’ve been complaining to my therapist for years about how bad I am at communicating: pickling up a phone or writing a text or answering an email, and how miserable it makes me feel. I just realized that I was wrong. I spend most of my time mentally talking to someone dear. This morning I was talking to you, dear Rosie. My stream of consciousness consists entirely of a dialogue with loved ones, some of whom I haven’t seen in years. And while my immediate physical circle is depressingly small, my spiritual circle is astonishingly wide and sustaining. So no, I am not bad at communicating. It’s just that I lack the proper means. If one day we discover telepathy, you’ll be amazed. Which also makes me think that if… when… we discover the ability to read each other’s thoughts, how many wonderful things we will learn from the animals, plants, rivers and others. It is foolish not to presume that everyone has a rich inner life, that everyone remembers and listens. The only dead things on this planet may be the billionaires.

In the past week, I said to four different women: I love your earrings. Not as a compliment, but as a spontaneous expression of joy that I experienced seeing them so beautiful and so beautifully adorned. The first pair was long, shoulder-dusting beaded earrings in turquoise, white and black, with geometric pattern. the second pair was three corn ears growing of of the same stalk in each ear, made out of white beads. The third pair was abstract women profiles forged of some yellow metal, superposed on dark brown disks. The fourth pair was dark red textile fringes that looked like open wings – a wing in each ear. Thinking about these earrings, about these women, makes me smile. How kind it was of them to choose those beautiful ornaments and make my day. I feel the same way about people who wear scarves, have whimsical tattoos or use feathers in any way (although the latter one is rare). And what to say about necklaces and bracelets. Tote bags. Comfortable shoes. Things that say: I don’t need to consume my way to the top. There is even a possibility that I don’t believe in the top’s existence. Bless you all. One day I will learn how to be like you.