The illustrations throughout this essay are courtesy of Olha Bublyk (an artist from Donetsk, currently based in Ireland). Here they return in altered forms, with the artist’s full and generous permission.
Dedicated to…
More-than-characters:
The sun
Home as people
Kisses behind the fir tree
Two windows—one cream-curtained, one looking out at the railway
A mulberry field on the shore of the Azov Sea
Mountains as the pearl of Crimea
Perekop-Dzhankoi
Juniper
Dolphins
The final exam at the factory Кристал ‘Crystal’
Chestnuts
Simferopol’s peripatetics
Grandmother’s garden
Do not deserve dedication yet appear:
Isolation
Black snow
Vomitous, commummified toponyms
Dirt and Decay
I. Something. Something has been drilling our brains, tickling our hearts and trembling near our ears elusively. Some-thing.. or quite some things? For how long has it been going?
Voice 1: Aesthetic is just a way of living. You don’t even think about it. Until one day you travel to the Donetsk region, get off the train, and the snow is black. And you are like, what is happening?
Voice 2: (laughs) We were making money for Ukraine.
There is, or was at least, a green dot on the map of Donetsk—Kuibyshevsky district. Before 2014, mothers would consider changing districts in pursuit of breathable air. Or so was whispered. The district bears the name of someone whose wikipedia bio would not make sense if you read it out loud, resembling rather an unsettling mix of consonants and numbers:
tse ve ke pe (be) 1921 1922 1923
Politburo tse ve ke (be) 1927 1935
1934 1935 er ke pe (be)
tse ke ke er ke pe (be)
er en ka es er es er…. And so it goes.
Voice 2: I remember just one road, and another road, and a McDonald’s. I wanted to write down the names of three nearby streets. And they all were…Push…Len….So I just wrote ‘square’.
A teenager who becomes an internally displaced person by fleeing 400km away from their now-occupied-hometown is being laughed at for calling a rubber eraser ‘grater’.
vrrrkkrrhh…VRRRKRRRH..
‘I can no longer listen to anything. This song has something poisonous in it. It awakens greed. The more you listen, the more you want to hear. The more you catch, the harder it is to catch.’ Could it be a kind of self-censorship in the brain, not fully conscious, contemplated Voice 1. The desire to omit, erase, rename, the desire that Voice 1 has just discovered in themselves.
Steel is rather commonplace in Donbas. Rubber is for pussies. Give me something that shreds. Dagger or pen1 is not the question. If I revisit the past, I would rather be armoured. While the tragic scales waver, I, without casting a steadfast anchor, drift, and I drift, and I drift, I drift…
Voice 2: Whatever, I just wrote ‘square.’ I’m deleting (the other half).
Voice 1: Oh, I even forgot about Lenin Square, see?
I drift, I drift, adrift, in the so familiar that it almost compensates for the disturbance it causes, smell of lemons grated right after onions, on the same grater, without a pause to wash off the remnants. Were they doing it because they were saving water? Or was it the desire to spice things up? Blend? Be careful not to bleed as the object in question getting grated shrinks in size. Often, the desire for completeness comes back right at you. In a matter of blink, the roles reverse, and now it is you who is being grated.
Voice 2: Do you remember Izolyatsia? I can’t place it on a map, as I don’t even remember where it was. But I know that the sound design there was such that you could walk through a single space and the soundscape would shift completely..you’d move ten meters, and everything changed. And then, later, I saw on instagram that it became, well…
A torture site. That’s what they turned it into.
‘The chain chokes your throat and drives your fiery anger back into it. Wait a moment.’
The hand walking through the printed map in A3 format, encounters sound changes even at a faster speed, of 12meters per second/centimeter. The red-panel-houses that à la panel-house romanticism are easy to remember, red also brings alluring danger of the shawarma spot, located just a few meters below, the same road. ‘You always go there, even though you probably shouldn’t eat it.’
Four-teen, fif-teen, six-teen
3 more seconds
Extending to the radius of 7km
Making it harder to
Overcome gag reflexes
Provoked by
Boulevard…
Voice 2: boulevard (puking-sound imitation)…shkina.
Donbas Arena…Rinat’s…bleeew…shame.
Separating the art from the artist may be hard, but have you tried separating feelings of pride from those of shame for the city’s symbol and the oligarch-traitor behind?
And what separates Shakespeare from Rosa Luxemburg, the reader may ask. A street. On the map.
‘But, in the end, do I know where my life ends and someone else’s begins?’
II. Look at me, sun, and sing my soul…make it inaccessible…
Voice 2: Windows are such spiritual beings.
Voice 1: (Nods). True, true, we both thought of that, without even planning to.
To every window, there is often a curtain. Especially in the Crimean longitude, where the sun arrives unannounced, slowly and assertively, just like a guest that has become so close that it does not ask for permission. A pinky cream, a little translucent cloth awaited the guest patiently. Over the years it had learnt to give itself away in the greeting, while remaining intact, just enough to distill the sharpness and pass on the remaining warmth onto the still and quiet body in bed. It taught the light to tip-toe. To respect a half-vampiric rhythm by which local life moved: early rising, errands before noon, hiding indoors until after seven. At noon, tourists marched to the beach.
Voice 2: That’s when Donetsk ate fish on the beach.
Despite the quiet disapproval of the locals, the sun did not mind. For the sun, every spectator was deeply cherished. After seven, the crowd would double with pale and alive again faces, getting out into the cooled air-the first drink of the evening.
The curtain did not lose its sight. It saw it all. The massive green debris and their silent half-siblings, shadows. How could you not notice?
Whether those curtains are still there now is uncertain. They may have been replaced, or burnt, or sealed behind new walls. Now the ‘local’ (here in the context of ‘taking place here’, non-native) vampirism is driven by the pursuit of capital. The Russian settlers have been building over every open patch of land, multiplying windows without air.
‘You throw there your cruelty and your savage instincts. All the horror, all the dirt of your existence. What do you care if you torment me? You want to be my master, you want to take me…my hands, my mind, my will and my heart…You want to suck me dry, all of my blood, like a vampire.’
After all, are they of any use in a hive of concrete and halogen?
Voice 1: The sun is full of warmth, even in winter….That is probably all there is to s(t)ay.
……
The sun walks into the forest. Light turns into shade, finally dissolving in darkness. The forest can keep a secret. It is too occupied by its own microcosm to run around spreading rumours. There is no demand in its gaze. Next to it, school and home appear tiny and too proportionate, as if the world had been scaled to fit a child’s hands.
Voices: The trees were the architecture I trusted more than buildings.
Voice 2: That’s why the center of my map is almost empty.
Voice 1: Empty, or just unimportant?
Voice 2: Both, maybe. The rallies, parades and central squares…I remember it too, but it doesn’t feel worth recording..
What truly matters resists topographic representation. There are certain places where you go because you must. These places can be easily found on maps. Damp roots and dripping pipes of and near the water station are the sentimental places. It is through this romantic ache they become known enough for you to belong to them entirely. The scratched inscription on the stairwell walls reads: ‘X was here.’
The map is sparse. On the contrary, the forest is dense. It is within these meshed roots, on the walks through the grove, the language grew its roots. Two people walking hand in hand.. Maple, linden, poplar.
‘Maple, linden, poplar’, the little voice echoes.
Voice 2, now grown: The forest is very important to me. I couldn’t learn Ukrainian in kindergarten. They didn’t understand that I spoke Arabic. In those forest moments, I did not know that this was how my second language was planting itself inside me.
Through smell. Through soil. Amidst the home curfew bracketing the routine trips to school, music school, and back, there was a portal. A window. For fifteen years it was the only piece of the outside world I had. Nights were spent at its edge. Eyes unfocused. Streetlight blurs into constellations. Spacing out. Beyond them, facing the building, towered the forest—well, artificial, they said. And the child, the child could not tell the two apart.
There was a train, too. You knew it was there without looking. In fact, the sound would announce its passing before you could even see it.
Now, in Valby, the train still passes. Although the windows are too good—soundproofed and obedient.
Voice 2: Every day I look at it and try to hear it.
Yet if opened, just slightly, the sound returns. In the low breath of distance, the rhythm becomes familiar. And for a moment, it feels like everything has folded back into place.
Voice 1: But see, there are no people on my map. The less you have of a physical home, the more home becomes people.
Voices: Where the people are—that’s home. Everything else…whatever happens, happens.
Some stayed. Very few. The Crimean home is now scattered in pieces. Everywhere, you name it. The people who remember, who know what it all means, they are home too. Even if they are not there, and I am not there physically, home breathes with them, wherever they are.
You could place me on that same street, next to that same house, and it wouldn’t be it. After 2014, crossing border after border, I have walked it. You walk through the familiar and no, it is not. It might look a hundred percent the same, but it isn’t home.
ʼIn a cloud of dust returning after working on someone else’s field, dirty, unpleasant, with sagging breasts, bony backs… leaning like shadows over the hemp… sickly looking children together with hungry dogs… Everything that I looked at and didn’t seem to see. It was like a conductor’s baton, that suddenly evoked a whole blizzard of sounds from the dead silence.’
Voice 1: I know that for sure.
Voices: As of 2025, home is dispersed, speaking in many tongues.
‘And I keep walking, like the sun in the sky, and I’m so pleased that the shadow of someone else can still fall between us.’
Eighteen minutes to school, according to Google. A long way for a child who wasn’t allowed to walk far. Every day, twenty minutes there and back. The smell of chestnuts in bloom. Heavy and sweet.
There is a road here in Denmark, lined with chestnuts. Years pass. And one day, while biking past, the smell caught up, and I thought..hm, chestnuts. And suddenly warmth, fastened pulse, return.
Back home, there were fewer. Mostly birch, oak, but closer to the centre—chestnuts.
Always something blooming somewhere. Occasionally someone who would remember.
III. Like a beast.
‘[t]he exhaustion of natural resources is probably much less advanced than the exhaustion of subjective resources, of vital resources, that is afflicting our contemporaries. If so much satisfaction is derived from surveying the devastation of the environment it’s largely because this veils the frightening ruin of subjectivities. Every oil spill, every sterile plain, every species extinction is an image of our souls in rags, a reflection of our lack of world, of our intimate impotence to inhabit it.
—Invisible Committee, 2014, qtd. in Rolnik 2017
‘You scourge earth’s sacred silence with the grinding factories, rattling wheels, you pollute the air with dust and smoke, roar with pain, with happiness, anger. Like a beast.’
They said it was temporary. But temporariness can last decades. Faults, cracks, fractures of rock, together with time, can facilitate crystal growth. Vinnytsia has its own crystal, Вінницький завод ʼКристалʼ (Kristal, eng. Crystal), a fossil of the Soviet past, where Donetsk National University (was) relocated after 2014. Recrystallised? It was rather a shell of light, dimmed eyes inside. The day of the last exam of a university that no longer had a city, just a factory plant. A student, also relocated from Donetsk, arrives to defend their thesis. The teachers who once believed that Donetsk would return, not only physically but mentally, now sat in silence. What used to be an immortal dream of every journalism professor, turned out to be pure carbon. It burnt under the wrong heat. Having lost homes and hopes, they sat in Kristal. Some were learning to live with distance. Let the ash remain ash? Will it nourish? Will time let it settle? Or is it better to scatter? Keep in a vessel? Is home now the size of a fist?
Voices: Do nothing.
During the exam, nobody checked for cheating that day. Nobody cared (to). The world had already cheated on them. Far more thoroughly than any student could.
A place can keep the same outline long after its soul is gone. Water can carve out the centre of a stone, while the stone will visibly appear the same. Wood too, even as rot eats it from inside, it would take years to knock it down fully. Even soil and water keep their face when poisoned and exhausted.
Before Kristal, there had been a house. The student’s mother spent ten years building it, after surviving the brutality of the 90s with a chemistry degree, three children, and no savings. Seven years in Palestine, running a small business, to come back and buy a plot near the forest. She built that house for years.
So long, that the construction workers that were there, saw her children’s childhood, then teenage years, and even the first outline of adulthood. Eight or maybe ten years of labour, and once the roof and the walls just began to settle, the Russians came and took it.
And before that, there had been the garden. The mother’s mother collected seeds from everywhere the military had sent the family. Seeds and bulbs wrapped in paper travelled kilometers to be put in soil by the same caring hands that shielded them in paper. But to cross the border wasn’t enough, there had to be a place worthy of becoming a garden. Not in soil quality or size—chornozem is generous everywhere, but in having a path of earth an old woman could walk to, morning to evening.
When they moved to Shakespeare street, she planted them all: rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thoughts, daisies just because.2:
Voice 2: I have never seen so many flowers. Maybe only botanical gardens.
And before even that, there was the library. A massive one. The shelves bending under the weight of books relieved the weight of being raised in the absence of people.
Voice 2: It made me who I am.
The current owner of the house is unknown. Neither the fate of the books. They could have been kept, sold, thrown away. It feels strange. Strange to dream of bringing them here, knowing that the house now belongs to someone else. The world can stay shaped exactly as you left it, and yet still be gone.
Voice 1: I marked ‘dirt and decay,’ this is the area around the Petrovska ravine.
Cliffs and Scythian ruins drew many to that place, including her. After the occupation, she learned that the former sentimentality that kept her attached was now buried under layers of waste. Plastic bags and used condoms, the sour smell of decay makes you turn back immediately. The Crimean mountains covered in trash, making the trails she used to hike to save her own sanity, polluted beyond return. ‘Okay, I am heading home.’ That is how it is now. Unfortunately.
‘The chain chokes your throat and drives your fiery anger back into it. Wait a moment.’
By 2015, it was gone. There were brief returns to collect belongings or pay visit to remaining relatives. That first year it was obvious that a lot of people had come in, and as I understand it, they just don’t have a culture of tourism. Not the ecological kind, anyway.
Voice 2: And no sense of ownership either.
Voice 1: Exactly. You are walking the same trails you walked your whole life..and I can’t say that during Ukrainian times everything was super fancy, let’s be honest, people are people—but that level…I fell into depression because of it.
Voices: Fine, they took my home, we will try to move on. But this attitude toward nature! I just….
Voice 1: I don’t believe in essentialism. The whole ‘we are like this, they are like that’ is too primitive…
Voice 2: But!
Voice 1: But when you see a landscape transformed in a year…Something else has moved in. It wasn’t the local people who did that.
Voices: It is just their format of life, their way of being, their way of thinking.
…Run in a circle…once more…like that. Oh, noble dog, for you freedom is more precious than satisfied anger.
And all those billboards. Massive portraits of political party leaders. Red, relentless, pasted over the town. Did I step into a parody?
Voice 2: Their ugly fucking faces everywhere. What is this, (North) Korea?
It is full to the brim. Leave me alone…
She cared for every abandoned animal in the neighborhood. In the first years of the occupation, many were left behind. In the years to come, more came. The cycle of feral life. One day she called in tears. The staggering of pseudo elections required imitation of order. They poisoned them. You can’t force a russian passport upon a dog. The evil of making life unlivable without one, the banal of bureaucracy requiring one. If it can not serve the purpose, it must die.
You try to catch air. Dust is filling your lungs.
IV. A pear mussel shell…green/blue halves. Crimea. Sun enclosed like a pearl. Green waver will…devour [the huts].
Who can I trust to keep the archive when streets lie? Languages, routes, worlds still breathing?
When Donetsk fell, one of the voices was hiking in the Crimean mountains. Out of reach. The phone mute. No signal. Later, the sim-card stopped working.
Voice: Suddenly, everything just disappeared. Yet the mountains continued breathing. As if saying: it will be like this forever… it will be like this forever… in saecula saeculorum… in saecula saeculorum…
Crimea is its own kind of madness…Starting from Kerch the land is nothing but a thirsty desert. Then, the desert softens into forest, then the forest rises into mountains. And suddenly, with each step you take, the horizon revises what it wants to be. Fundamental as it is. Fearless. You walk and see trees, and their roots, rocks braided into bark.
Voices: How can this be real, how can the world arrange itself with such audacity?
Voice: When the news reached me long after the fact, I had only one thought (voices in unison): BITCH! BITCH! It’s the Ukrainian pearl. You don’t get to take this.
What do those huts mean to that force? Nothing.
Voices: Is it a conifer?
Voice 1: Yes. It’s strange—half tree, half bush. And there are trails where you have to push through it.
Juniper is endemic to the Crimean (especially Eastern) coast, a crucial part of Crimea’s eco-cycle. Rooted sideways into the cliff, it holds its ground in its own way. A kind of stubborn resistance. It does not agree to becoming gin. Or beads, combs, spoons, hairpins. Or little carved figurines on someone’s dusty shelf. A flute, maybe, could hold its breath. But who am I without my smell? It fades away like a word does when you say it too many times.
Voice 2: One year it all vanished. And I wondered, ‘Where is juniper? What are we selling tourists now?’
Voice of a man working at the eco-station in Alushta: They’d harvested all the juniper for these souvenirs. Almost none left. The whole Crimean ecosystem collapsed from tourism.
Voices: When did that happen?
Voice 2: I think around 2015.
Voice 1: Makes sense. Occupation stripped it to the root.
Cover it with the clouds of your grief to bring on the lightning and thunder. Refresh the sky and the earth. Extinguish the sun and light up another one. Speak, speak…
But what about the sea…
‘Take it, it’s Crimean,’ the grandmother insisted. It wasn’t offered so much as pressed into my palms. Sometimes loss hardens into an artefact. A single wooden dolphin. It stayed without being sought.
Voice 2: I didn’t take anything from Crimea myself. I wondered why. Grandmother’s insistence moves in circles. ‘That’s her dolphin,’ apparently it stood on my shelf, I can’t even remember. Around 2018 it made it back on my shelf. A shelf it had no memory of.
Voice 2: Not that I am ascet, I look around my flat—there’s plenty of junk in my corners. I guess it was never a priority for me. Maybe I didn’t want it to cling to me.
I have a wooden dolphin, but I honestly don’t know how the real populations are doing. There are two endemic subspecies: the white-sided dolphin (білобочка), known as Black Sea common dolphin, and the bottlenose (альфіна).
Voice 2: Where does this knowledge come from now? Probably, school.
Red. note: there is also a third one—harbor porpoise (австрий).
Who knows whether they still exist. Who knows whether they will still exist in ten years. The last endemic dolphins swim through toxins that travel across borders more efficiently than people do. Russian spills cause death. The damage stretches further from Ukraine’s coast, to Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania too. A light wooden proxy for a sea now shadowed by runoff and ruin.
Voices: If the dolphin could speak, what story would it tell?
Voice 2: That dolphin probably lives in the waters of the Black Sea. And it’s saying ‘It’s not okay for me either. Even if I’m not a citizen of Ukraine, russia brought trouble into my home too…’
Voice 1 (picks up): ..’I’m not a citizen of Ukraine, but death to russia.’
V. When you leave, I cling to you…I gather you from flowers, laughter…
Sharp, piercing sounds flash….I want to catch them….not able….
And then they vanish. You nostalgize as a form of keeping. ‘Oh, that area is beautiful. Even if you are just riding by and looking out of the window—it catches you.’ If there is time, jump out of the bus. That walk is worth it.
Voice 2: Outside-the-market type beauty. It boosted your serotonin just to stand there. Voices: We preferred to take a walk after classes. When there is no need to rush.
Fir trees spread their branches in layered whorls. Branches too sparse to really shield us. For years we entrusted them with the role of our silent witnesses. Shy kisses in its shabby shade. To a student who had no money for cafes or privacy, that was a heaven on earth. A cathedral of cost-effective freedom.
Voice 2: Hide and kiss behind a fir tree. Just beautiful.
Voices: Beautiful.
And then there is this place that probably wouldn’t make anyone’s list of beautiful things. My second home. But the forest was there. And the cemetery. You are thirteen, and for the first time, a drop of alcohol enters your body.
Voices: ‘A drop’ would be an understatement.
Running loops, falling, not feeling pain. Thump. Getting up, back to loops, running. Thump. Back at it. As if the body hadn’t developed the language for continuity yet. The only thing it knew was repetition.
A new, clean page peeked out from under the old page of life — and I couldn’t believe it. What will be written there?
And then there are these moments with no footprint ahead of them. Unheard of. Unprecedented absence of adult supervision. Gone for two weeks. The only ever—weeks.
Voices (jumping to the ceiling): The weekend starts now!
The first ever kiss at home. Not with your brother, you always specify, as the joke stuck to your family like a burr. It was Yasmoot’s friend. You always crushed on his friends.
Forest was our reprieve too. Behind it—school No.6o—cramped, H-shaped, and full of stories you wouldn’t dare to tell in daylight. But right next to it—school No.66. The most beautiful building in the world. Hogwarts. I swear. With stories 15 shades darker than those of the school No.60.
The bus No.54— metronome of your student years. Duk-duk-duk, through the whole city, and despite the morning traffic.
The same rhythm every single day. Trying to squeeze into a corner seat.
Voice 1: You’d think the routes were logical, but no. Absolutely not.
You remember the route body-first. Five years is a long time to take the same ride. The route drilled itself into the body. If asked, you could draw it blindfolded. Ting-ting-ting, cell by cell, you knew every district. Forty minutes, sometimes an hour, elbow to rib, forehead to glass. A grandma sliding onto your thigh against your desire to still come across as….. Piles on notes balancing in the lap. Two rows behind you, someone is asking for change.
Voices (over your shoulder): Please, pass the fare.
Voice 2: People, please, I’m dealing with serious matters here…
Voices: You are not in control. The bus sets the tempo of our thoughts.
And maybe that was the point. Chaos all around. Shifting from reading to thinking, simply. That was surprisingly grounding.
Voice 2: The stretch I drew, right here, along the river—I often walked it instead. Many of my friends lived in the centre. The stretch had a name. Peripatetics. Ancient Greeks would walk and talk philosophy. That was our main entertainment too. No money for cafes, and you are this little snob from second-year history, discussing heavy topics, drinking kefir.
Voices: What are we feeling today? Aesthetics or heart-to-heart?
Roses, lilacs, and a small pavilion,
pretending to be a castle.
Down the road, plane trees so tall,
They could cover the sun.
An actual mini castle
left from imperial times.
The alternative path with a newly restored garden.
The botanical garden offered its own version
of beauty.
Appreciating beauty of all kinds,
For us it was just aesthetics.
Although saturated, by the always dramatic,
Light.
Voices: For a heart-to-heart, keep to the river.
Then you walk, and walk, and walk, to finally arrive at the Candle building. That was the building with our dorms. I’d offer the dorm guard 5 hryvnias so I could stay at someone’s place, one the floor, in a sleeping bag. That was my way to avoid repeating the whole route again. At least the next morning.
Once is a miracle. Twice is cruelty. They did not choose it—they are just there.
Voice 2: We talked about propaganda all the time. And now I watch it take root in my own family. And I can’t pull them out.
Calling through static. The world you name is not the world that exists.
Voices: How do you make your grandmother leave everything behind? For the second time. Voice 2: ‘Let’s share a room with a barista near a chestnut tree?’ Not an option. They’re just done.
If once was a miracle. Twice is, certainly, a cruelty. Assembling the map in the cupped palms of memory, you are left with gathering echoes as they fall; having become a custodian of what refused to vanish.
VI. Has the time stopped or is it flowing? Maybe we should get going?
This is an exercise in choreography of misalignment. Stand still. Body. Not the whole body, but the way it comes apart. Choose one part of the body to focus on, for now. Always an option to start by shaking a leg. Let the rest wait their turn. Notice how the other parts respond. Are they patient? Is anything boiling up? Let them delay its response.
This exercise can be done anywhere. Indoors, outdoors, in transit, although it works best if there is a door somewhere in view. Open, closed, ajar, does not matter. Do not aim for harmony, or else you would be deceived by the false sense of your own control. Let the parts negotiate on their own. Observe. A body never breaks all at once.
Just a little, with a slight creak…
Can anti-arrival be rehearsed? Here, we are merely testing the seam.
And as you do, keep your eyes on the door—
What do I know? Do I know…
Return to the body. Part by part,
Can I be sure that the door will not open up…
A threshold’s only verb is to tremble. Before anyone names the rupture.
‘Beyond Perekop, there is no life.’
Voice 1: It’s a pretty typical Crimean thing that we don’t really operate with ‘where exactly you are from,’ or what city we live in. I would usually tell everyone that I’m from Crimea.
Voices: Okay, but where in Crimea?
Voice 1: Well..Simferopol, I guess.
Voices: Even though we…
Voice 1: Well, I’m speaking for myself, but I know this from my friends, from my whole social circle, we operate with the whole peninsula at once. Our thinking is very regional…
Voices: …because it is a peninsula.
There used to be this saying: ‘Beyond Perekop, there is no life.’ There is only that tiny little isthmus that connects you. Before 2014,
Voice 1: I didn’t even have a mental map of russia before 2014.
Voices: It meant nothing to us.
Voice 1: That Taman’ over there, it was like- ‘I don’t know, some dog-headed creatures must live there.’ Seriously, it was irrelevant.
We were from here. We knew how to read the sea and what to eat so as not to get sick. Maybe there was a bit of snobbery in that. Tourists just wouldn’t listen. They bought everything. No one cared about sanitation.
Voices: People were so happy to be in Crimea that they didn’t care.
Voice 1: Remember Dzankoy, when you drive back to the mainland? How many shashliks were there!
Voice 2: The good kind?
Voice 1: And people selling melons, corn, peaches..
Voices: Bruising in the heat!
Voice 2: And shrimp everywhere, sold out of plastic bags.
Language is a sort of threshold too.
Voices: Threshold! You sure? Maybe more like a pit. Survival shapes speech the same way drought shapes soil.
Thripillia whispers from the subsoils: the pit you climb out of, that root becomes a syllable. She used to say that languages are older than maps. That somewhere beneath the everyday grammar, there were currents reaching far, right in the soul. She would passionately talk about the influence of Tripillia on other (Latin) languages. Yama> jam> yam. So many words whose origins you can’t trace. You survive first, debate later.
Voice 2: That’s when I realized my two countries share the wound, why same fears exist in Palestine and here. No generation of Ukrainians ever had the luxury to do anything but survive… Phobias come from the same exhaustion. And lack of time.
Voice 1: I think it’s a defence mechanism to choose an information reality that grants you the right to live.
Voices: We don’t talk now, but I think about them constantly.
‘Enemies and friends, close and distant—they all scream in my ears with a cry of their life or their death’
A whole other life behind a door that won’t open. Maybe with the only exception. Onto a reality that feeds delusions. What you carry across. All of them leave their footprints on my soul. What you refuse to carry back.
‘I will cover my ears, lock my soul and shout: the entrance is not free here!’ I stand and listen.
Two people stand and listen to each other across the shaking hinge, unable to enter, unable to leave.
Voice 1: Mental health can hold out only as long as it can hold out. For me, the full-scale invasion was the last drop. Over the years, I’d periodically lose memory. I have two hundred thousand photos on my phone because I knew something would slip. And I know I’ll pay for all the clouds there are, because I don’t have memory. But I’d never experienced such a total loss. My psychologist later explained that to rebuild your life, some memories have to go. You have to focus. It sounded illogical to me. I couldn’t form a sense of self. I had no personality. I didn’t know what I wanted or where my values came from. The first two years—blur. By the third, maybe three and a half, things returned. Not everything, hashtags. I tried to talk to people, but not to anyone from Donetsk, it hurt too much. And until I felt strong enough, I didn’t try to retrieve anything. I was afraid that if I started remembering I would simply end.
Voice 2: That’s really great to hear, actually. I hear something and I’m like, ohhh, that’s me—and then immediately, no, no, different experience. Stereo effect. I’m a historian, and I have a good factual memory. I can still lay out every step: we did this, then that. It’s not that I forgot. It’s that I had a kind of not-quite-deliberate forgetting on the emotional level. For me, Crimea is like a toxic ex. You know, when you know someone, and you share deep, powerful memories with that someone, and then one day they’re replaced. You don’t recognise them anymore. And you think: is something wrong with me? Or is something really wrong with them
That I can’t fix?
All these golden memories, all the times that were genuinely good. Everything then was right, beautiful, In its place.
It is scary to even say a word. He used to be your friend, was like-minded, but now he may be secretly selling you out. You tell him something, tear the words out from your heart, and he will throw them to the dogs.
I had a friend like that. For seven years—sister-level close.
First religion, then Russia. The person vanished. Like in a zombie apocalypse.
I tried to keep the bond, I thought we could get through it,
She was the most important person to me.
Lies, gossip, nothing recognizable.
Then she put me on blacklists, explained nothing.
Something happened that I can’t explain.
The same thing happened with Crimea.
People ask, do you follow the news, do you remember?
No. I don’t want to. At first it hurt,
but then you need to live a life: pay rent, find work, move again,
Now it just drains. What Stalin, what dolphins, what the fuck are you doing?
It looks the same but it isn’t.
My Crimean friends, some of them, love nostalgia. They start remembering: this beach, that bus stop.
I see the pain in their eyes, as if it were all stolen yesterday.
I ask, what’s wrong with me?
We all come from the same substrate, soil,
The memories are valuable to us
but I don’t follow, don’t recall, don’t dive in.
They want to live inside the ache, I can’t.
I cut it off. Like a toxic ex. ‘Goodbye!’
If you want to be addicts, sorry, I can’t help you.
I hope something breaks the spell one day, lifts you out.
But that life isn’t mine anymore. That problem isn’t mine.
Maybe not healthy. Maybe selfish. Sometimes I ask myself,
Are you still rooted there?
Voice 2: I don’t think it’s selfish at all.
Voice 1: Coping..
Voice 2: Exactly. It took me years to understand that everyone’s capacity is different.
You keep your distance. Not out of fear exactly. Out of knowledge.
Voice 1: Absolutely! You still need to co-exist somehow, and that is hard. You try to communicate your viewpoint. Still show respect. All while you don’t understand what’s going on in the other person’s head.
You are like,
‘Okay.’
Voice 2: So talk about what you can talk about.
Voice 1: My mom is trying to rebuild a relationship with me now. She says: let’s not talk politics. That drives me crazy. What she calls politics is my (whole) life. I’m not even on the frontline, neither in Ukraine physically. My work is related to Ukrainian refugees. Even seemingly ‘safe’ topics are political. I will raise my child in Ukrainian. She is exclusively Russian-speaking. Is that politics or not? I check every morning that my friends in Kyiv are alive. In this space and time.
So I keep it superficial—’Everything’s fine.’
Voice 2: I think she wants to talk politics with you but can’t. She wants you in her life, but to talk politics would risk losing you again. She doesn’t have the capacity to admit she’s wrong.
Voice 1: Of course she won’t. Because to admit it would mean recognising her life as complicity with evil.
Voice 2: But is love stronger than that?
Voice 1: My first impulse is to cut everything off. I kept it cut off for a long time. My husband says: Do it. If there’s no way, cut it and move on. Simple. Don’t talk to her until she admits she’s wrong. I say that will probably never happen. He’s very supportive, but you can’t explain this logic to someone outside the context.
Voice 2: If he were in your place, he’d do the same, try to connect. Because she means more than politics.
Voice 1: See, I can’t even frame it as politics. It’s life.
Long conversation.
Voice 2: We need a different argument then. It’s sad, big time. My mom has different views too, and I would dream of a mother that… But I want to know. I don’t want to die thinking I didn’t talk to her because someone made her life so hard she didn’t have time to become like me.
Voice 1: I hear you. But then there’s a question of individual responsibility. It’s as if we take their agency away, saying ‘Oh, someone did this to her and she couldn’t help it.’
Voice 2: Her parents suffered famine, impossibility… You grow up with 25 generations of trauma, and then you are told, ‘And now change your views.’ We grew up with the internet. You have great education, international friends.
Voice 1: Exactly, that’s privilege. I admit that. But then we can dig into everyone’s trauma and then nobody is ever responsible for anything.
Voice 2: So what do we then propose? I’m not saying remove everyone’s individual responsibility. But what are we going to do about it?
Voice 1: That’s the real question. We can rationalise both points, easily.
Voice 2: I think because we are this way, and we understand where you come from,
‘Let’s work on it.’
But the conversation must start from love and acceptance. If we put ourselves above them,
This (conversation) will never end.
Back to the exercise. To the same narrow ear. What you choose to do with the tremor, is where forgiveness begins. So I stand and listen.
VII. Who can console me with loneliness? Death? Dream?
Voice 2: Windows are such spiritual beings.
Voice 1: True! We both thought of that, without even planning to.
Dreaming starts where the map closes its eyes. Contours slip. Lids lowered. Breathing slows. Distances shrink. We are either kids again or our minds are trying on all their years at once.
A tower rises. Except it isn’t a tower—just a hole in the ground. Dreams have the ability to edit upwards. In another dream, I slept there illegally. Tried to sneak past the guard—did not work. Luckily, he preferred weed over rules.
Many other dreams bring me back to Mariupol. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times.
Another night I dreamt of our dacha in Berdyansk. It stood on a cliff, one to one to how it really was. The mulberry fields and the Azov Sea. Eerily real! Maybe a tiny bit titled, but that I can live with. Maybe dreams have their own gravity. I spent so much time there—summers in Crimea, off-seasons in Berdyansk, planting flowers.
Ruins of my memory have been restored so gently, I can walk barefoot.
‘Yes, you know, I took a delicious juicy plum…and felt a pleasant sweet taste in my mouth… You see, I don’t even blush, my face is white, just like yours, because the horror has drained out all of my blood..’
Voices: I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times. I feel lucky when I dream of peaceful times.
Voice 1: The berries, figs, a kilo for 20 hryvnias!
Voice 2: Easy! From grandma’s garden straight to the table.
Voice 1: Nothing like that ever happened to me again. Two full fruit seasons—blueberries, everything..
Voices: Anything you want.
Just one peaceful dream please.
Dream refuses the sentence and repeats the season. Loss and sweetness trailed in equal measure. Words spoken by morning wisdom. And so you wake up, empty-mouthed. Sometimes it’s enough to keep you running until lunchtime.
They let Kerch tilt into forest, forest into mountains, mountains into ruins, ruins into a window where a girl sits, into a tower that is also a hole, into a summer hours held together by bad insulation and sons’ laughter.
The smell of Head&Shoulders 2001 appears from anywhere. Dogs disappear. I was told they went to a farm. ‘I am six but I am not stupid!’
A dacha near Donetsk, built by two people who didn’t know what construction was. Berries, cherries, gooseberries, red currants. Whose hands pick them now?
The digital camera is in my hands, teeth trying to squeeze the prettiest cherry. The scratched skin on your knees—it was worth it. Back when the word selfie did not exist. Click.
A man killing a mole with a shovel.
I asked for a pleasant one, for god’s sake!
Voices: What was happening in Donetsk?
That was weird. This old man, our neighbour, goes, ‘Kids, come here, come here.’ So we came. Thud! He literally called us over to watch him kill a mole in a bucket with a shovel. Weirdly, I do not feel anything. I guess I was glad I wasn’t that mole.
Voice 2: It doesn’t look like that in the photos.
Voice 1: It doesn’t?
Voice 2: Imagine it looking a little better.
Voice 1: One day we will go check it.
Voice 2: We’ll go check it, absolutely.
Here I feel rich, even though I have nothing. Because beyond all programs and parties—the land belongs to me. It is mine. All the vast, lavish, already created land I contain in myself. There I create it anew, for the second time, and then it seems to me that I have even more right to it.