The snow is back. Heavy, waterlogged March snow. It will probably be gone by Wednesday or Thursday, but for now the world looks almost normal outside of my window. The world outside of my window is a couple of maple trees, squirrels running up and down the trunks, a small suburban house, almost a mirror reflection of my own, another tree of some unknown to me species with a bird-feeder. It used to attract all kinds of birds, now I hardly see any. Maybe, the winter was too warm, or maybe the neighbour stopped filling it.

We switched to the summer time this weekend. Now once again I wake up in heavy darkness. In the evening when we come back home though it is still full light. I feel lost and disoriented, as if something sad happened, but no one wants to tell me what.

Mstyslav Chernov got an Oscar for the best documentary for 20 Days in Mariupol. I went to YouTube to watch the trailer (which I’d already seen). The trailer is 1 minute 49 seconds long. I broke down and started sobbing uncontrollably 30 seconds in. For the rest of the day, I am trying not to think about it.

It was the adjectives that first tipped me off. I like adjectives, in moderation. I like them in a Charlotte Bronté novel. It was a dark gloomy morning, reader. This kind of thing. I hate adjectives in news articles and social media posts. I hate them even more than hashtags. When every name or noun in a news article gets its own adjective, you know you’re reading propaganda. Propaganda, written by good guys, is still propaganda. It is inherently untrustworthy, even if written “by us” and “against them.” The more you read propaganda, the longer the string of adjectives gets, the wider the divide between us and them becomes and the more intense the pressure to prove that you are “us.”

I understand how people get high on solidarity and the feeling of being right. But, coming where I came from, this is when I defect. This is what I love about Ukrainians. We always remain sceptical, especially of power. We know that every revolution has a potential to become a reign of terror. It doesn’t stop us from doing revolutions, but we don’t descend into tyranny. From what I know of Ukrainian history, we never had a home-grown tyrant.

Here is a funny story: I must have been nine when I got recruited into a school choir. Together with everyone. There must have been about ninety or a hundred children my age in that school and we were all in the choir. The ones who could sing were put in front, I was in the fourth row, which was the last. There is a theory, proven by practice, that in a large enough group even people who can’t hold a note eventually fall in tune. I suspect that I may be an exception to this rule, because I was the only child who was kicked out of the choir. Even all the way in the back, I managed to sing out-of-tune enough and loud enough to make other kids lose their tune.

The social media feed becomes more and more like the Hate Week in Orwell’s 1984. There is no more nuance, there is no more conversation. Instead, we are shouting slogans at each other. The ones who today are praised because they speak of justice are the same ones who yesterday advocated for violence. They say that none of us are free until we all are free. In reality, “we all” most often means “all of us, but not them.” The question is, who decides who “they” are.

This March 8th it feels like most posts on my social media feed are subtly or not so subtly accusing others of not being good feminists. The feed, usually passive agressive, is now bristling with outward hostility. I gave up writing anything publicly and should give up reading, but part of me is addicted to the toxic air and wants to know what happens next.

Growing up, March 8th was a big deal. It replaced Mother’s day, St. Valentine’s and all Spring holidays altogether. Officially, it was Women’s Rights Day, unofficially, it was the Day of the Woman, the Day of Beauty and Spring, sometimes even the Day of Love. Everything, everywhere, all at once.

In kindergarden, March 8th was celebrated with a talent pageant where neatly dressed children were reciting badly written poems about how they love their mothers. Because there was no mothers’ day, March 8 served as a proxy. When I think about kindergarden days, I usually remember exceptionally bad food and lack of water (for some reason, we were not allowed to drink between meals). Today, however, I wondered about the amount of poetry I had to memorize as a child. I suspect that poetry was a soviet fetish. My own children, growing up in Canada, never learned a single poem. I knew tons. We had to learn poems in kindergarden and recite them in front of our parents, we learned poems throughout school, and even at home, I was constantly asked to recite poetry to friends and relatives whenever they gathered. Reciting poems in front of adults was an ultimate soviet childhood experience. I wonder if anyone wrote books about it, if anyone ever wondered why we were forced to learn so much poetry by heart.

In school, March 8th became more nuanced. There were still some remains of Mother’s Day that gradually were being replaced by the complex politics of reciprocity. See, the International Women’s Day had its male counterpart. Men and boys were celebrated on February 23 – the Day of the Soviet Army. Which was ironic for many reasons: first, celebration of the military as all things masculine; second, celebration of all men as warriors in the country, where about half of the menfolk were dodging military conscription and for a very good reason. Still, the rule remained: on February 23 the girls were giving presents to the boys to have the favour returned two weeks later. The popular joke went: how you spend your March 8 will depend on what you did on February 23.

When I got to the end of the high school and into the university, the Soviet Union was long gone and March 8th was gone with it, at least for a while. Some flower giving and cheesy postcards remained as a silly habit that one can’t quite shake off, but the rest was gone. I never missed it.

It is Wednesday of the first week of March of the hottest winter on record, it is raining, so it feels like a perfectly adequate time to freak out, which I am doing right now. I feel myself in this strange liminal space, like Lewis’ forest between the worlds, except that there is nothing peaceful or calm about it. I am torn between the compassion and anger about the suffering of Palestinians that is so disproportionate and cruel it almost seems unreal. Who would do that? Who would think of that? On the other hand, I feel growing discomfort. Every social media post I read about how morally corrupt and despicable all the western governments are, how “the western powers” are war criminals, every post that uses monikers like “bloody-this” and “genocide-that” makes me cringe. not that I disagree, it’s just the feeling of discomfort that I can’t shrug off. This morning it dawned on me: the reason I feel this uncomfortable is because these posts of rightful outrage are becoming word-by-word copies of the Soviet propaganda I heard as a child. Corrupt West, colonialist Europe, bloody governments, all the while ignoring the Uyghur genocide, the multitude of Russian crimes and so many other things. It is chillingly familiar: give the world one war, one crime, one atrocity to focus on and forget all the rest. Draw the lines, deepen the divide, turn truth and compassion into propaganda. You can build an Iron curtain with that material, a three-meter concrete wall, literally overnight. Better still, make them turn against each other while you carry on solidifying the east against west, south against north, while you profit off selling weapons and oil and gold. We all have ancestral memory and mine, the DNA of my ancestors, starved, executed, deported and cut off their culture, finally wakes up to recognise the rallying KGB cry. And I am very very scared. Understand, it is not about who is wrong or right, it is about the division to the point of no return. Now, the real monsters will come.

Sometimes

I forget to finish a thought

Sometimes

Someone else decides to do it for me

Which is something

I am sometimes

Grateful for

Unless it is done

In a rude and mansplaining way

Sometimes

I stop mid sentence

Sometimes

My brain decides to remember

That the language I speak

Is not my own

And every word

Starts sounding funny

and unfamiliar

Sometimes

I become afraid

When I realise that I forgot the names

Of the streets

In my home town

Sometimes

I panic

How will I come back

How will I find myself

In the labyrinth of memory

I wasn’t planning

To write about immigration

The initial plan was to write that

Sometimes

I send you unfinished texts

Trusting

That you know the end

I struggle to articulate

An alternative ending:

Sometimes

I wish I could call myself

A poet, an activist, a matriarch

Whatever that means

A leader

Without blushing

Or thinking myself a fraud

Or toning it down

I wish I could own the thoughts in my head

Say them out loud

Finish my sentences

With a loud

Listen to me

We walked back home in the dusk today and counted stars, but the moon was nowhere to be found and it felt terribly important. There was no moon in the sky tonight, March 4.

Karel wrote today that the end of winters will also mean the end of our culture, well, their culture. I know that what is happening on this warm and balmy day may be the beginning of an end, but for a moment it just feels like a beginning, an emergence of something. It feels like spring. It is in a wrong time and place. It is lost, poor darling, but insistent: the sap is running, the topsoil feels wet and ready, like a womb about to give birth. I may need to check on the crocuses and planting the milkweed seeds I’ve been keeping since last spring.

I had so many thoughts today. About Kamala Harriss’ call for ceasefire, about Navalny and the reason I think everyone should read Kostyuchenko’s book about Russia. But I realized that I don’t want to write down any of them. Presuming that I will have a chance to read this many years from now, I want to remember the untimely spring and the moonless night, the heartbreak, the love, but not the politics.

It was supposed to be the dead of the winter. Well, maybe not the dead of it, but the time when sunny days follow vicious blizzards. It took me long enough to get used to the idea that March is a winter month. Now, I don’t know what to think anymore.

Clearview boulevard stretches in an almost straight line from the entrance to the city to the edge of the forest. The edge of the forest is a large clearing with very old apple trees that no one tends to anymore. In the late summer, does come here to feast on apples. Some evenings there are as many as a dozen. They lift their heads and watch me, the intruder, with wary eyes. Sometimes they let me pass without a movement. Sometimes I step on a stick of make a brusque movement and they take off into the forest.

I think that the Clearview boulevard is the best street in the world, because it leads to the forest. It is a busy street, probably the busiest in our town. It proudly hosts our town’s tiny concert hall, a gas station, a half a dozen bus stops, a Tim Horton’s, a local shopping centre, an ice arena, a high school of incredible ugliness and right behind a private condo complex – the closest thing our town has to a gated community. The condos boast a view of sunsets over a water reservoir) to which they have an exclusive access. I tend to think of them as class enemies, but I still love their view.

Past the condo complex the street becomes quaint and quiet. One can be almost sure that everyone walking either goes to the forest, or comes from it. Then, without warning, the town ends and the forest begins.

I almost gave up on my walk, except I couldn’t. The melting of snow, at least a month too early, and recent rains made the paths almost impracticable.

The mud slowed down my pace and transformed my walk into something unexpected. It was almost like interacting with another form of life: the mud was slick and slippery in some places, sticky and gooey in others. It yielded under my weight and made me yield in return, as I slowed down, looking for footing. In some places, it was possible to walk on the leaves carpet along the path – it felt like stepping on a trampoline.

I often choose to walk in the arboreum, because there is hardly ever anyone else there. I try to memorize the names of the trees and tell them apart – it doesn’t come easy to me, especially when the trees are naked. There is Elm, Butternut Hickory, Black and Sugar Maple, Black Cherry, Red Cedar and White Eastern Cedar. Then there is this White Pine that looks like arboreum’s matriarch to me.

I my native language, forest is masculine and tree is neutral (neither masculine nor feminine), so I grew up thinking of forests in masculine terms. Recently, I realized that metaphorically (if not biologically), the trees are much closer to the feminine. Thus transformed my view of the forest. Now I see the community of mothers, aunts and grandmothers. Now I feel safe and confident in their company.

I haven’t decided yet through which linguistic lens I see the mushrooms (also masculine in Ukrainian). Even in the very early days of march, mushrooms are present and thriving, assuring me that life goes on.

And so do the mosses. I keep walking thinking that I am probably a one-percenter. After all, how many people outside our town live in a walking distance to a forest?

I may be wrong, but I don’t remember a pond at this particular place. I think it’s just an accumulation of snow and ice and water that creates a temporary illusion of a pond. Somewhere else in the forest there is an actual lake that isn’t one. It got overrun with algae and plants and is now slowly turning into a meadow. Here is a hollow that temporarily became a pond. I love how the forest constantly reinvents itself.

I took a different way back home. It is a bike line along a large water reservoir (the same that brightens the view of the gated community). It used to run along the backyards on one side and a wild growth: birches, sumac bushes, asters, milkweed, young maple and ash trees on the other. Now part of this wild growth has been destroyed and some developer is building luxury townhouses, another gated community with a view on sunset.

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