Mama sent me a video of the sea today. I watched it three times. I like thinking that there is a sea somewhere. There is always a sea somewhere, living, breathing, moving, making waves. What if the distance, the kilometers of land between me and the sea don’t separate us, but connect us?

I like thinking that my mama is now walking by the sea, breathing in the salty air, covering from the wind, poking pebbles with the tip of her shoe. I like thinking of her on the beach. She used to carry me in her body. We share the same DNA. So, in many imperceptible but important ways, there is a part of me on that beach today.

I like that there are no people on the video. We’re yet far off season. The sea is resting, undisturbed by the white-bodied northerners, impertinent children and busy crowd in the beach cafés. I used to live and work on French Riviera, I know the difference between the sleepy calm of the winter and the frenzy of the summer. I always liked the sea in winter. I always liked that in France you can take a two hour lunch break and no one would bat an eyelash. Nobody likes their work in France, so we know how to make the best out of the blessed two hour pause in the middle of the day. In winter, I would put my sandwich in a back-pack with a notebook and a pen, and would bike to the beach. I would leave the bike by a picket fence that was about to fall over, cross the strip of sand and find a dry and sunny spot on a large stone near the water.

Unlike the locals, I knew my time by the sea would not last forever. I didn’t have any special skills that would solidify my connection to it or would tempt me to stay. I didn’t sail, dive or snorkle and I had neither money nor ambition to learn. The beautiful thing in that relationship was that it was me who was temporary. I left, the sea remained. It still breathes and moves and makes waves. It doesn’t wait for me, but I hope that in some imperceptible important way it remembers.

This week I have finished a third version of a 40-page learnings report for work, got a positive review on my first Intercultural Leadership assignment, took a Kanyen’kéha test and did a good progress on my second Leadership assignment. Also, I managed to sleep, excercise and eat greens almost every day of the week, which should at least partly account for my relatively stable mood and stamina. Yes, I have a right to be proud of myself. I may not be proud of myself at every given moment, but overall I think I did pretty damn good. I also got hooked on the new Netflix rendition of One day, which is worth mentioning here, since I have absolutely no one to talk to about that. So, about One day: I had read the book when it came out and created a huge buzz and I hadn’t particularly liked it. I can’t remember though, if it was because the book wasn’t that good, or because everyone else liked it and I wanted to contradict. I do remember that I genuinely didn’t like the film. I have not thought about it in the years since (there ARE many books that I come back to mentally on a regular basis, like The God of Small Things, Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Shaggy Bayne, Jane Eyre or Gut gegen Nordwind). But lo and behold, Netflix puts the forgotten book into a 14-episode story with a “diverse cast” of talented Gen-Z actors, and I can’t get over it.

I notice how my attention to book genres swings depending on my overall state of mind and, I suppose, the sate of the world that hasn’t been great or even acceptable for a very long time. During my good periods, I feel intense passion towards non-fiction in the Community and Culture or Indigenous Voices sections, or towards good solid literary novels (for some reason, I love reading through Booker and Governor General Award shortlists, but completely ignore other literary prizes). In the bad periods, I am drawn towards horror, science-fiction or, as was the case in November and December, at the worst of my mental health crisis, “historical” romance novels. I think the deal here is not just the escapism, or rather it is not just escape from reality, it’s escape from myself. Those genres are foreign to me, they do not reflect me, so reading them I can pretend not to be myself, put aside my intense and tiring personality and be someone else, someone who reads on the beach of an all-inclusive beachfront hotel during the Spring Break.

Reading on the beach brought me back to the memories of our summers in Crimea. There was no hotel and absolutely nothing was included. We rented a small room from aunt Natasha, an emergency nurse who worked in Eupathoria and lived in a small military settlement with her always drinking husband (sometimes, without him), her rebellious daughter Marina and young son Zhenya, whom I intensely disliked for no apparent reason. I used to borrow books from Natasha’s library and smuggle them to read on the beach, because other than bathing the beach was boring. I was never particularly interested in building sand castles (I mean, real sand castles, I’m good at building methaphorical ones). So, I smuggled books to the beach, only adult books. I remember reading some biographical novel about Beethowen, crime novels, Dickens. The only book I was not allowed to take to the beach was Gone with the Wind, because it was rare and hard to find. So, I pretended to be sick and missed wonderful summer days and the warm Black sea to read the story of Scarlett and Rhet Buttler. Now Crimea is under occupation and I wonder what happened to aunt Natasha and her kids. Would they still remember us, if we met? Would they consider us friends of enemies? Do they still have the little flat we used to share during our summer vacations and the books that lined entire wall of their little living room slash bedroom slash guestroom?

The picture is from yesterday, when it was sunny and untimely warm and the body enjoyed spring, although the mind understood how strange and bad it is to have spring in February. Today is humid, gloomy and very warm, 16 degrees above the average for the season, and the wind is howling something frightening. We’re expecting a flash freeze tonight and are almost placid about the possibility that we will lose electricity. Or maybe we won’t, in which case we will consider ourselves lucky.

These days, I have received several invitations from people I respect and for the opportunities that could open other doors. Usually, I would be torn between my inability to say no (I really do feel like I owe every person who asks me something) and my ambition that would push me to say yes to everything. Today, I was able to say “no, thank you, it sounds wonderful, but it is not right for me” and actually mean it. It is alarming that I do not remember another time I’d put my well-being above my ambition. I hope this is a start. So, let me write it down and repeat it:

not everything is for me

not every time is right

it’s ok to say no

saying no may empower other people to say no

there is more than one way to love people and more than one way to make a change

The little one is sick today, not enough to unsettle me, but just enough to stay at home and turn what was supposed a busy working day into a smooth drifting between cuddles, answering emails, playing and fitting some deadlines in between. It was such an unbelievably quiet day. A day that feels incredibly full and satisfying although objectively nothing happened. A day when we lived every minute without rushing through it. Thank you, my little troublemaker, for teaching me to slow down.

The weekend has been mercifully sunny. It still surprises me, although it shouldn’t, how much power they, the sun, the moon, the winds have on us. It still surprises me, how much time there is and how much one does when one has “nothing to do.” I start seeing the weekend as reconnection to kairos, full and expansive, uncensored. A time when one can grieve or rejoice without toning down or sweetening up. I’ve done both. I even spent a whole hour sitting on a couch and reading for pleasure and still had time in the evening to prepare for my Mohawk test and write an outline for an intercultural leadership proposal. Weekend is the only time I don’t feel exhausted. I start suspecting that there is something fundamentally broken in my relationship with work.

There is a seven hours difference between Kyiv and Montreal.

It was around 5am in Kyiv, still late evening in Montreal. I was sitting downstairs in my office, trying squeeze a few extra hours of work out of myself, before taking time off for spring break. That’s when I saw the news. I didn’t call anyone, not immediately, I didn’t move. I howled. That’s what I remember, howling and sobbing for a very long time.

I remember checking news every minute, then checking Facebook for personal updates, then texting, then waiting, then checking news, Facebook, texting, waiting, news… I remember Natashka hiding in the fields behind her house, I remember hearing nothing from Vika for ten long days and how I cried when she finally wrote back, I remember sitting in the hospital with my broken hand and getting updates from Olya who was trying to escape from Kyiv with her parents, I remember Natalya sending updates on her kids – her little Vira was only two at the time and so afraid of air raid alerts, I remember Olesya asking to pray for her parents in the occupied Irpin.

There is a seven hours difference between Kyiv and Montreal.

I woke up every day to the news of the fresh atrocities. I remember having a panic attack in the middle of the mall – I was supposed to meet some friends to talk about a difficult work situation. A few minutes later, I got the news of the bombing of Mariupol Drama Theatre. When it was evening in Montreal, the stream of news slowed down to a trickle. I remember laying down next to my son, who still slept in his baby cot, and praying, trying to say as many names as I could think of. Name by name by name by name.

I used to save the screenshots of news articles, photos, facebook posts about people killed by russia with their names and life stories, artwork that was even more heartbreaking than photos, and poetry. I have hundreds of those on my phone. Some of the artists and poets have since been killed in the war. 730 days is a very very long time. God have mercy on us.

Poets are the most courageous people I know. I’m fine with writing poetry, as long as no one ever reads it. But I have friends who dare to read their poetry out loud – it makes me gasp every time, not only because it’s beautiful, but with a sheer force of their vulnerability.

I am reading Elena Kostyuchenko’s I love Russia. Kostyuchenko is an award-winning investigative journalist from Russia, a LGBT+ activist and a dissident. I saw her book at the library and thought “this is a really bad idea,” then I thought “I don’t have to love it, I don’t even have to care, but if I really want to believe in reconciliation, I have to at least try to listen.” See, what I learned is that reconciliation is always, always personal. Like any practice, it has to be holistic or it won’t mean anything at all. If I want to practice reconciliation, I cannot avoid of thinking about it in the context of Ukraine and Russia. This is still a very uncomfortable truth.

So, I started reading Kostyuchenko and haaving very conflicting feelings about it. I read the English translation – on the one hand it makes the whole experience surreal and alienating, seeing all familiar names in latin transcription, on the other hand it takes the edge off all the triggering material. I don’t think I would have managed to read it in Russian without breaking down. It also makes me understand why they keep supporting the war. In the hopeless, drunken and violent reality Kostyuchenko describes who would care about anyone’s life? Seriously, this book is not particularly trying to terrify and thus is thoroughly terrifying. At this point, I don’t feel sympathy for the people she describes, but I do feel some flicker of understanding.

I wanted to add the book to my “currently reading” list on Goodreads and got scared. What if my Ukrainian friends decide that I fraternize with the enemy? What if it triggers them? What if me reading the book will be interpreted as tacit approval of russian liberals? Again, through my own experience, I realize there is no common ground to stand on. And I don’t know where we can go from here.

I was just watching another short documentary about the residential schools. There was a vivid description of a catechism class, where the nuns were describing purgatory to frighten children. This reminded me of a time, when someone in my protestant pentecostal church gave me a tape with a weird testimony of a person who supposedly went to hell (either in a dream or a vision or some kind near-death experience, I don’t remember). I remember that I really believed the authenticity of that tape (I must have been around 14) and the story about that person actually seeing what hell was like. I remember being terrified. When I think about it, I remember being terrified for most of my teens. Of course, there was my family situation, my dad being in a hospital and my mom, thin with worry, working 12-14 hours a day and chain-smoking in the kitchen the rest of the time. But the main source of my terror was the belief that the people I love will go to hell, unless I save them and convince them to join the church. I haven’t thought about it for a very long time, but tonight it dawned on me, what a terrible, traumatic burden was placed on me back then. I was a child, a teenager, I was lacking confidence and role models, I was lacking care, not because my parents were uncaring, but because they tried to survive in their own ways. And here I was tasked with saving everyone I knew, lest they burn in hell. Not scared for myself, scared for them. Here I was, frantically praying every night, unsure if God hears, always trying harder. Here I was, overcompensating for everything I believed was wrong with the world. I am still overcompensating. I can’t heal myself without healing that terrified 14-year old, who just listened to that terrible tape. I need to find words to reach her. I still want to save the world, save everyone I love, I just don’t think I want to carry the responsibility for it any longer.

It seems that we still have winters, if only for a little while. Monday, bathed in the glow of the winter sun and still retaining the flavour of the weekend, feels good and solid. All focus, zero adrenaline. Liberating myself from social media truly feels like liberation.

During my mid-day walk, I realized that I haven’t written down all the small moments of the weekend that I remember so lovingly:

Having a chance to cook and to clean on Saturday

Painting with kids with my favourite acrylic paints

Kids making guacamole together and eating it with chips

Watching a whole movie on Saturday night

Sunday morning crêpes

Kids’ friends coming over to play with them

First time sledging this winter

Finishing Emily Monnet’s Okinum

Sushi in the evening

Reading the poem written by a dear friend for my late cat Echo

Falling asleep on the couch, tired, but not exhausted