This morning I woke up again with the weight of the world on my chest and my eyes were wet with actual tears. Isn’t it ironic how the only matter that makes it from the dream world to the other side are tears? Our ancestors were right, November is the time when the boundary between the worlds is at its thinnest and most fragile, when every separation, every crack in the universe is felt with particular acuteness. November is a long process of falling apart. The sequence of days and dates: first, the shift to the winter time – the early darkness, the elections, the 1000 days of war, the anniversary of two revolutions (and a long forgotten anniversary of another one), finally the Holodomor remembrance have ended in one long heartbreaking dream. I also notice that dreams, the ones that feel like another kind of reality, more immediate and uninhibited than my waking reality, often come at the end of the three-week cycle, just before my next therapy appointment.

In my dream, I was having a very big party. Not just any party, but some kind of reconciliatory fest meant to bring together family and community after a rift or some sort of tragedy, meant to make things right. There were many people and the walls of the room were warm chestnut brown, the windows were big and there was grey autumn lights outside – it looked nothing like my house, but I knew it was my home. There were many children, most of them dark-haired, loud and rambunctious. There was loud music. I was waiting for someone, anxiously. Other people at the party told me they wouldn’t come, that I should just enjoy myself, but I was posted on the sofa in the middle of the room, playing with children and keeping an eye on the door. At some point, they came. The party went on, but it stopped for me. There were three of them: a man and two dark-haired, sad-looking women. The man looked nothing like anyone I know. To be honest, he looked like Frank Gallager from Shameless, which may be explained by the fact that I’ve been binge-watching Shameless for the past three months. The women looked a little bit like the Turkish woman from my previous dream, but I didn’t recognize them. Their presence shook me. I got up from the couch and came up to the man and clung to him and started crying with the kind of cry that fills all your chest and makes it difficult to breathe. I woke up slowly, as if emerging from the depth, with my chest still aching and my eyes wet.

Something else I remember from this night is half-waking from another dream, while it was still dark, and telling myself “They need to learn how to live in darkness. This is the way we’re heading. We know how to do it, we’ve learned, they need to learn from us.” I think by “we” I referred to the Eastern Europe and to all we’ve been through during my lifespan and before. Who are “they”?

I had a breakdown. It was one of those weeks when I feel like I am walking around with no skin on. Every thing, good and bad, rips through my tissue right to my heart. It wasn’t just this week, but the one before and the one before that. Creative fever, difficult conversations, trump, soul-shattering argument with an old friend, another old friend mourning the one year anniversary of her son passing away, her son was the same age as my daughter, a joy from an unexpected Friday email from someone I am afraid to care too much about, feeling totally and completely held by people I trust, having hard time getting up in the morning, falling asleep in the evening bus, feeling various degrees of loneliness, sadness, love, feeling so much, all the time that the feeling itself wears you down, yet being afraid to let go of that feeling because if I no longer feel how will I know I exist?

Saturday morning didn’t bring peace. In a short time between getting out of bed and rushing to children’s extracurriculars, my son cried because he absolute wanted to draw a picture with a black marker and didn’t have a black marker. When we found a black marker and he drew his picture, he started crying because it was all black. Isn’t this art imitating life? Then he cried because he didn’t want to go to karate. Then my daughter cried because I saw that she still didn’t brush her teeth and said « are you kidding me? » She thought I was screaming. Maybe, I was. Then we walked through beautiful sunny morning, sulking and keeping distance from each other. Just before separating in different directions, we held hands and said we loved each other.

After I dropped off my kids, I went to the coffee place where I read my Indigenous Spirituality course book every Saturday morning and ordered coffee. I just settled at a small table in the corner, when the young girl who works there on weekends came up with a big earthenware mug of latte snd said « here » putting it in front of me. This is what broke me. This simple gesture of care. The girl walked away and busied herself putting out Christmas decorations. Coldplay’s Hymn for the Weekend was playing. I was staring at the dusty pink earthenware coffee mug in front of me, my eyes burning and tears streaming down my face. I felt so full, so whole, so grateful, so surrounded by love, so heartbroken for the loveless world. The Hymn for the Weekend ended and The Fugees’ Killing me Softly came up and I cried again, because I love this song so much and because it always matters what music plays. I wish we payed more attention.

There is a squirrel outside of my window right now at the very tip of a very thin branch of an almost naked maple tree. She is diligently picking every last remaining grain and fruit and stuffing them in her cheeks. The squirrel knows the winter is coming. Squirrel has no idea about the genocide or American elections. She has no language for either of those.

When I was young and part of the evangelical movement, our favourite joke was about the Sunday school teacher who asks children “who is little, gray, has a big furry tail and eats acorns and hazelnuts?” A little boy raises his hand and answers: “I do know that Jesus is the answer to everything, but this sounds awfully like a squirrel.”

Now, being much older, I wonder if squirrel was the right answer to everything all along.

When I was younger, I lived in the binaries. I moved from joy to despair, losing myself in every emotion completely and with abandon. I remember this one episode, I must have been about fifteen and had a falling out with my good friends – they were a newlywed couple, slightly older than me. Or, maybe they told me they had marital issues – they ended up divorcing eventually. I must add here that both me and my friends were evangelicals, so marital issues leading to a divorce did seem like the end of the world. And after this falling out I decided I would never be happy again. Never smile, never laugh and avoid talking as much as possible. I was so devastated, even worse, I was angry either the world for continuing as usual, blissfully unaware of my devastation. I think I lasted half a day, but it was an intense half a day.

Now all I see are spectrums and shades of gray. I had a huge argument with a friend yesterday over Trump election. He was angry with me for being upset about the result, while one or another made no difference in the genocide. I wanted to tell him to f*** off, but instead I said I am sorry for triggering you and I love you. And he said I love you too. Today I got an email from someone I have only met twice. Someone wonderful and young and doing amazing work in the world, who shared that they had an amazing week working with environmental justice activists in Mexico. What I realised is I like living in the world full of spectrums and shades. I like that we can cry and be angry and celebrate and despair and fuck and break things and laugh till our bellies hurt and all of this at the same time. I’ll take this world over binaries. But I have conditions: I will not pretend that I am well when I’m not, I will not hide my feelings from people I love, i will not show them to people I don’t trust, I will accept whatever people I love want to show me and set my boundaries with others and I will not be afraid to tell people I love them. Because love and unconditional acceptance is the most revolutionary, incendiary and counter cultural thing right now.

Get up before 6am. There is no way to not know what you already know.

Coffee. Food. Write something, anything, just not be silent.

Notice the unreasonable warmth for this late in autumn, notice the strong southern wind pregnant with rain.

Meet a neighbour on my morning commute and talk all the way about love and motherhood and future. Not mention the election once. It’s incredible how much I know about this woman and how much she knows about me just from these few shared commutes.

Change the planters for our office plants first thing in the morning. Feel earth and water and permanence of the good things.

Eat lunch at ten in the morning. Try to write emails and fail. Try to write something else and almost succeed. Text people who I love that I love them.

Go to therapy. Cry for the first time on my way there. Cry almost all the way through my session.

On my way home, see through the bus window that through small openings in heavy inky clouds shows the beautiful orange of sunset. Cry the rest of the way.

Go for a walk at night, wishing I’d thought of putting on my running gear. Try to write a course paper on Indigenous spirituality and fail. Instead, spend an hour on YouTube listening over and over and over to one song. L’Amérique pleure.

Sometimes I feel like I live on a fault line about to open. Like I can physically feel every crack in the universe. Usually, it happens around full moon, in the spring, when the ice cracks, in the autumn with shedding of leaves and all the migrations, visible and otherwise. At every tipping point: light turning into darkness, darkness into light. Speaking of which, I hate the hour change.

I love people who stop to look at something. In Ukrainian, the verb look and the noun miracle have the same root – it is anything but coincidence. In my evening walk in sad November twilight I met a woman with an old German shepherd who stopped to watch a lonely goose flying over our heads with sad sad cries. Then I saw a young man, standing next to his bike looking at the trees wrapped in pink of the dying light, reflected on the surface of the water reservoir. Then I stopped myself, as a flock of geese – relatives? – was flying low under our heads. From that short distance I could hear not only their plaintive cries, but the whoosh-whoosh of their wings. The most beautiful sound.

Thank you to everyone who’s not writing to me these days. I am doing ok. I could be doing better. There is always possibility to be doing better. As I acknowledge this possibility, I wonder if the possibility itself limits my agency in the present moment and state. I could be doing better, but I am not. And maybe I am not doing at all, but being, breathing, listening, yawning, feeling very very tired, feeling my skin lose its summer glow, my eyes losing their shine as they adjust to a bleaker backdrop of late autumn.

Anyway, thank you to everyone who is not writing me. I experience your silence not as abandonment, but as space. I know we don’t need words. I wonder… if with some of you we’ve come to wordless understanding. In the wordless understanding, there is no guilt, no expectation, no public to perform for, no eloquence, no need to prove oneself, no spellcheck, no self-censorship, no ego. The wordless understanding is defined by what it is not. What it is will be left unsaid, undefined, unspoken.

The woman in the seat in front of me is learning some language that looks like Japanese on some app. What are the chances?

I went for a jog in the forest and saw that the birch trees have lost all their leaves. On Wednesday, last time i’d been there, they still had some. I thought i’d be sad, I was prepared to be sad. Instead, in a sudden burst of enlightenment, or a moment of awareness, I felt at peace. The birch trees, naked as they were, didn’t look frail or miserable or desolate, they looked ready for what was coming. The trees were giving me a lesson about letting go. They were not holding on neither to the vitality of summer, nor to the the wild beauty of the autumn. And at the same time as I was resisting winter with all my strength, with every fiber of my being, they simply embraced the change.

The two maple trees on my backyard have also let go of their leaves, as have the big poplar tree just outside of the fence. My backyard is full of their gifts. When I lay on the ground, I can disappear in them. I can feel the small animal part of me, weary and cozy and grateful. Maybe, I am ready.

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.