Today we had the worst blizzard since 1950s (apparently). They are closing schools again tomorrow and it feels like things haven’t been normal for such a long time. I am trying to do all the things I know I need to do: yoga, walks, swimming. I know I am doing things right, but nothing feels right. I scroll through the headlines without reading the articles. I have too much anger as is. The world hardens me. Then, at the end of the day I get a text from an old friend and it unravels me. Kindness makes me cry. I keep thinking back to those first months of Covid, when my son was just a baby and we were locked up and scared. I had taken up a habit to call my parents three to five times a day, just to make sure. I think I may start doing it again. It’s one of those things, you see, like when you are a child and you decide that you will avoid stepping on the cracks, because as long as you don’t step on these cracks everything will be alright and everyone will be healthy and live forever. So, I am desperately looking for the cracks not to step on.

There are days when I am not ok and there are days when I am disintegrating. I keep interrupting whatever I am doing and picking up a pen to write. Writing feels cathartic, like ripping a bandage off an unhealed wound and letting it bleed. It doesn’t make it easier to breathe. It doesn’t help, but it helps. of the things I wrote today, one is a poem for my friend Louise. I called it A Bouquet of Grief:

A few days ago, Louise shared an article about different kinds of grief.

Without looking at it I knew that I would check every box, still

I looked at it and checked every box, then remembered that lists are not my thing.

What if instead I arranged my grief into a bouquet?

A bouquet is not a haphazard bunch of blooms, but a floral message.

So I decided to sort through my grief, petal by petal, and make it into a gift,

Or something beautiful.

The first flower is normal grief, the one where we move through stages

Never quite past denial, never quite free of anger, always bargaining and praying for acceptance.

The second, anticipatory grief of the future,

Of my own mortality (on behalf of my children),

Of mortality of my parents, friends and loved ones,

Of prospective rare earth mining sites,

Of melting ice caps,

Of polar bears,

Of deep ocean ecosystems,

Of coral reefs,

I can go on for ages

Should I continue?

The third, complicated grief

My inability to accept the loss of the nine-year old son of my old-time friend

Who was killed two Novembers past by a car while waiting for a green light at a busy intersection in Phoenix, Arizona.

The knowing that every morning my old-time friend opens her eyes to an empty world,

The knowing that every morning she prays to God I no longer believe in.

The particular sadness of kneeling besides my bed at night with a long list of people and places to pray for

And remembering that I no longer know how to pray.

The fourth, disenfranchised grief of an immigrant,

Of someone who has lost her name, her sense of place and her sense of humour,

Because things are never as funny in translation,

Who traded her birthright for a G7 citizenship and visa-free travel,

Who sometimes wishes that someone asked her where she is from and gave her time to answer properly.

The fifth, collective grief

Feels almost like joy on the rare occasions when we come together,

We don’t have to grieve the same things, let it be different things,

Let it be different griefs, but together.

The sixth, ambiguous grief, like when a colleague casually asks you “do you have any friends”

And you walk out of the kitchen without answering, wondering why your friends

Aren’t returning your texts and never write first and why you

Still haven’t answered happy birthday messages received last June.

Why in fact you never answer birthday messages, as if you were afraid to believe that you mattered to people.

The seventh, absent grief about no longer feeling hopeful about the world.

The eights, secondary grief, when your children are fighting and you break down in tears

Not because they are fighting, but because of the war, and the climate change,

And the fact that AI will surely destroy humanity, and the fact that humanity surely deserves being destroyed,

But you still feel sorry for it.

The ninth, silly grief (I just made that one up)

When you finish a really good novel,

Or your favourite show runs to the last episode and you feel inexplicable feeling of loss

That you wouldn’t admit even to yourself, because what idiot would grieve about an end of a stupid show, when the whole world is dying.

The last, cumulative grief as a space for everything else

Big and expansive and lonely and saulty, like an ocean.

This morning – I mean the quiet dark morning before anyone else wakes up, the kind of morning that feels like night, my favourite. I like this very early morning, because it feels like the only part of day that truly belongs to me, the one I don’t have to share. This is the time, when I am very quiet, when I function with minimal light and just as little movement. This is the time, when I am very alive. I believe, there are parts of me that are only alive during this time, the hidden, mysterious, exciting parts. This is the time when I write.

This morning I, while writing an essay for my university course, I somehow arrived to comparing the French verbs connaitre and savoir. Both verbs translate as “to know” into English, but connaitre means relational knowledge (to know someone) or practical knowledge (to know one’s trade), whereas savoir means theoretical knowledge, knowledge about something. Similar dichotomy exists in Mohawk (and, I suppose, other Indigenous languages?) and in German, but not in English or Ukrainian. As I learned today, it also exists in Greek. Definitions in French dictionaries and encyclopedia place savoir on a higher level than connaitre. Savoir is a deep, reflective, detached sort of knowledge. It’s a sort of knowledge one arrives at after years of diligent study. Savoir has a reverent ring to it, no matter its subject. Connaitre is more casual. It is knowledge of people, knowledge that comes from experience, also familiarity with the subject.

As I was muling these words in my head, thinking how the birthplace of the Enlightment, the nation of Rene Descartes and “je pense donc je suis,” of Napoleon and the dreams of universal conquest, the harbour of colonialism, chose to elevate the disembodied knowledge over the relational one, I thought, is it a coincidence that the verb savoir is only one letter different from the verb avoir (to have) whereas the verb connaitre sounds like the verb être (to be) and also naître (to be born). At this very early time of morning, this didn’t feel like a coincidence at all. Rather, it felt like revelation. The universe showing its pattern.

I know (I have checked) that linguistically speaking my proposition is nonsense. Both savoir et connaitre stem from latin roots. Yet, I still think that I am right. I think that maybe understanding… feeling the difference between the knowledge as possession and knowledge as a way of being is a key to transcending the paradigm that holds us captive.

It is still winter.

It will be winter for long, too long.

I am wondering about the milkweeed seeds I’d planted last spring. I think I did it too late and this commonest of wildflowers that lines every ditch and abandoned garden plot refused to grow in mine. I wonder if these seeds, now properly frozen, will finally decide to sprout this year. I wonder when crocuses will come this year and how many there will be. I wonder when will be the first day I will feel spring and who will tell me about it.

I managed to squeeze a short walk into my morning routine. What a Friday! The light was a pale, comforting yellow it only ever gets on a morning after a proper snowfall. It wasn’t cold, at least until the wind picked up speed and force, but I kept thinking about a line from Ada Limon’s poem I’d read last evening: “It’s cold today so the sun’s a lie.” I love poetry because it’s the only language I know for telling the truth. What is truth if not a tangled knot of contradictions? And where, except poetry, can we find as much space to hold all these contradictions together?

It was snowing today. A lot.

I actually hesitated, not knowing whether I should write “it was snowing,” “it snowed,” or “we had snow.” What a strange thing to say: we had snow. What a human thing to pretend to own something that could never belong to anyone. No, we didn’t have snow. The snow fell from the white expanse of the sky, quickly and angrily at first, chased by the wind, then slowly, as if apologising for earlier brutality. “It snowed” has a sad finality about it and, not liking the past tense in general, I settled on “it was snowing.”

I got caught in the angry part of snow, while I was walking to my therapy session. During the session, Maya said “you’ve never allowed yourself to fall apart.” She said it without a hint of judgment, but not as if it was a good thing. And I had a moment of recognition, not only of myself, but of my mother, her frail figure at the kitchen table when dad had his accident. She would come home after ten or twelve hours of senseless, back-breaking work, disappear into the kitchen and smoke, smoke, smoke. But never fall apart, not once during those seven years. I recognised her mother, whom I saw only on photos. How old was she, about twenty or younger, when Germans took her from her family and forced her to work at the rope factory as a de-facto slave. Falling apart is not in my genes, we simply don’t do this. There will be nobody to pick us up.

Still, I wonder, what it would feel like. I wonder, if I’d let myself fall apart, just a little, if I allowed myself some deep rest, would the effect of it reverberate back to my mother? Would it travel in time to heal the wounds? Would it actually help?

Tonight

Through the dirty window of the bus number 199

I saw the sunset at the hour

When for the past three months I was seeing only darkness.

I have not expected everything to hurt as much as it hurts right now. I have not expected to feel so helpless and so angry. For a brief moment last year I fancied myself wise, almost invincible in my wisdom, an elder in the making. Now I look at myself in brief distorted reflections in windows and toilet room mirrors and see a scared thirteen year old, her life stolen from her by her father’s freakish accident and immigration laws.

This morning I read about Trump’s demands for Ukrainian rare earth mining rights in exchange for aid. I felt breath leaving my body. Of course, I thought, this was coming. They will never be sated. They will never have enough. They are the Windigo. They will consume us.

The land that is source of my memories, my identity, the land that is source of my love and connection, my birthright, the land that has birthed us, that in these past three horrible years has opened again her womb to cradle the bodies of our sons and daughters, of our youth and our elders, the land that is worth dying for is just a source of rare materials to them. These materials are not even rare, but their extraction and refinement will transform the land into a dead landscape. They will kill my land to make more Teslas. To give our children a chance to survive, they will force us to sacrifice the children of our children. I cannot even start describing the feeling of violation.

As I was ruminating, the train suddenly stopped and remained immobile for a very long time. Everyone was relatively calm, absorbed in their books and phones. Everyone, except a large, burly older man, dressed in rocker’s attire with massive silver rings on each fingers and dirty hair, a kind of person I instinctively dislike. “Goddammit” said the man quietly to himself. And then, more loudly and insistently over and over and over “goddammit!”

They made us get out of the train, wait on the platform, then get into another train and still nothing was moving. The angry man now found a seat, but kept cursing. Then we heard a loud, clear child’s voice: a mother with a boy around six squeezed into the already full and motionless train. The angry man got up immediately, no longer cursing. “Here, sit kid!” The kid ignored him. Instead, he weaselled through the crowd to the front of the train where I was standing. I want to be in front when the train moves, announced the kid. I nodded. I do the same, I said. The boy had the most beautiful curly hair that looked almost like wool and large dark brown eyes. Just as he positioned himself in the front, facing the window, miraculously, the train came to motion. Maybe it’s thanks to you, I said. He considered my suggestion and nodded his accord. I will drive the train, he said to his mother.

The boy started making train sounds. I watched him for a while, then looked around and saw many people looking at him and smiling, as if they were truly grateful to this little stranger for driving us towards destination. Be careful, said his mother, now also involved in the game, the train will enter the tunnels, you have to slow down. The tunnel, the boy exclaimed with unabashed enthusiasm, oh yes! And this is the exact moment when my heart decided to break into a thousand pieces and the tears flowed.

We had a soft, fluffy, abundant snow today. The world is so quiet. As soon as my kids settle down, I have to step outside and take a picture. Breathe it in for a moment.

Of all the shitty news of the past weeks, the one that has hit me the hardest, strangely, is the news about shutting down USAid. I can’t believe it is all ending like this. All symbols of power and progress of my youth shattering before my eyes. They weren’t very good symbols, but without them I feel unmoored. I can’t believe it is ending like this. Not in a bang, or a whisper, but in an incomprehensible ramble.

I feel resentful. I certainly feel the loss of what little agency I’ve built over past year and the years before and I feel fucking angry. All this work, all this sacrifice, all this trying to become someone – just to find out, twenty years later, that this someone doesn’t exist. Maybe, never existed in the first place. The irony – my first scholarship program, the one that sent me to Alabama, was called Freedom Support Act. Now there is neither support, nor freedom. I am thinking of the ones who are twenty now. What do THEY believe in? Are they smarter than we were?

My daughter today said that she wished she’d lived at the time before the colonisation of the Americas. I don’t think she really means that, but who knows. I said, carefully, that life was not that easy at that time. She said, I know, but at least I wouldn’t be afraid of the end of the world. I still don’t know if I’m doing it right. Would it be better to let her believe that everything is alright? Or could I do a better job at teaching her how to live as the world is ending?

Today was surprisingly good. Then why I feel this particular sadness in the evening? I miss my family, I miss home, I am afraid of all these things that are happening that may happen. It is never not hurting.

Tonight, as I was helping my son to change into his pyjamas, I noticed that the tiny blond hairs between his shoulder blades grow in a spiral pattern. The same pattern that I saw long time ago in a shallow pool on the seashore. The same pattern that, whenever I notice it, anywhere, makes me feel at the same time important and insignificant.

Tonight I dreamt that I was saying good bye to my colleague. It was in a cafe with white walls and white furniture, near a large bright window. She was wearing a light wool top of light greenish blue, I never saw one like this on her, but it looked good. It was one of these strange vivid dreams where I was crying so hard that I felt my whole chest contract. The contraction lasted long after I woke up, laying very still, very quietly, thinking how I can be kind.

I picked up another book of poetry at the library. It wasn’t even planned. I was looking for something, anything, by Ross Gay. Turned out that something was his poems. Turned out that his poems are even better than his essays, which I dearly love. I am surrounding myself with layers upon layers of poetry. I am keeping very quiet. I am spending long time staring at my screen, thinking of everyone I want to write to, writing nothing. I am wintering.