Last time I saw them in concert was in Kyiv. It must have been 2005, so almost 20 years ago, a year after the Orange revolution. It was a big concert, they must have been celebrating their ten years. I remember being so young and the crowd around me was so very young, the frontman still had long hair, he used to tie a scarf to the microphone stand back then. I think that we had no idea what we were doing or were going to do. We just managed to topple the government. It felt like everything was going to miraculously get better from then on. Which of course it didn’t.

The frontman is older now, I am older, the crowd around me is older too. If someone’d told me back then in Kyiv that my next Okean Elzy concert would be twenty years later in Montreal, I wouldn’t believe it. Firstly, because no one believes at that age that they’d be twenty years older one day. Secondly, because Montreal or most places for that matter felt like an unattainable dream. Now it doesn’t feel like such an achievement.

I still know the words to almost every song. Sometimes, singing these songs is the closest thing to feeling home. It is both heartbreak and medicine. I feel so young again, so naive, I can almost remember what it was like not knowing. It is strange how we are all hurting, yet there is also palpable joy in the air, almost a bliss. We know the words to every song and he knows that we know them. He chose the songs carefully – every one is a new memory and a new heartbreak. Isn’t it strange, how twenty years, an ocean and a war later I find myself in the same crowd. And people around me are essentially strangers, except they aren’t. They know the words to my favourite songs. They understand things about me that neither my family, nor my colleagues, nor my new friends could ever understand.

I tell myself I can’t wait another twenty years for something to happen.