i wake up at 2pm, it’s late but it’s sunday and my body is grieving so i sit up and shake off the sense of anger that threatens to turn inwards
forgive myself for sleeping late, swallow the pills that bring me closer to neurochemical balance
put my feet into my тапочки one at a time
walk down the wooden stairs, one foot after another
a steady backing track, left right left right over to my french press as i pour coffee into my dartmouth mug that brings up memories of a time 18 months ago that was at least 3% less painful and complicated than the current moment
but everything seems less painful and less complicated than the current moment
that’s the nostalgia talking, that’s how the nostalgia works
and i’m here in this moment so i take what i can get, stitch together meaning
from the collection of symbols that today has presented me with and i move
left right left right over to the couch with my books and my embroidery hoop
i sip my coffee and check my phone, looking for a sign that my friend has forgiven me for a message from 3 days ago that i aimed like a wounded inquiry but that landed like a bomb
no messages yet
i shake off the self-hatred again, remind myself of what my mum told me yesterday
“give her time”
these things take time
resolution, repair, reconstruction
these things take time
self-hatred can burn like a fire if i feed it and i’m trying to starve it, I’m trying to snuff it out
i breathe deep into my lungs, picture my alveoli expanding with life, air ricocheting from one side of my body to the other, one lung to the other, left right left right left right
turn up the volume on the steady backing track as i lean into my highbacked reading chair with the embroidery hoop on the ottoman to my left
i pull in another layer of sound that bleeds in through the open window
my neighbors playing reggaeton, their voices etched with the feigned annoyance that really means familial love, teasing and laughing and speaking to one another in their backyard three floors below me, as they bring plates of food outside because it is sunday and they’re having a barbecue and this is the routine, this is love, this is family. it’s sunday and there’s a barbecue and there is good music playing because these are the things that tell us “we are alive here together in this moment, salted roasted simmering in love and holding our bodies up under the weight of a world on fire, pull up a chair, grab a plate”
i let my body absorb it via osmosis, pouring water on the fire inside me until the flame of self-hatred is snuffed out
i start stitching the pattern on the embroidery hoop, black thread red thread black thread again until the lines are solid and steady
i didn’t have a vyshyvanka to wear for vyshyvanka day three days ago
because families are complicated and mine buried theirs in their village in Rivne oblast when the NKVD was en route with the firing squad 80 years ago
sometimes you bury your heart in the dirt with the intention to go back and dig it up and the militias stand guard for long enough that you start shopping around for a transplant
sometimes you stop shopping around for a transplant because the hollow cavity in your chest feels heavy enough and the grief has already nestled in there and made a home of it
my family’s vyshyvanky are buried in a field in Rachyn and no one had the money to go back and dig them up
my grandmother’s family who didn’t leave Volhynia in time ended up in a mass grave, branded as enemies of the proletariat for owning two chickens and the small plot of land that they had worked for centuries.
i used to wonder if i could subdivide the land enough times in my head that i would find the right proportions to save them, but it’s an unsolvable equation. it’s Zeno’s Paradox, you break it in half and then you break it in half and then you break it in half and
you always approach a set that sums up to 1, but you never reach it.
you always approach a number that would satisfy the constraints of the game and then the gamemaster moves the line.
the point of the game is that you lose every time.
the point of the game is that the house always wins. and you are not part of the house.
in the soviet union, the revolutionary rally cry “peace, land and bread” rang out with a resounding hollowness that grew more and more pronounced as police forces of the politburo rounded up Ukrainian peasants and filled their bodies with bullets. when the bolshevik battle cry becomes a polemic,
you learn that the soviet ruling class doesn’t want all workers of the world to seize the means of production – you learn that they only want the right kind of workers to seize the means of production, and the rest will be murdered for trying.
my family, as it turns out, were not the right kind of workers.
one third of Ukraine, as it turns out, were not the right kind of workers.
half of my family is buried in a field in Rivne oblast a few kilometers from a box of vyshyvanky that were never passed down
Rachyn is a town i have never known with my hands and my feet it is a town of graves of the pieces of my family that were buried and hidden and never spoken about unless one of my uncles got overzealous with taking shots of горілка on christmas
spirits conjure spirits and the spirits are speaking in a language you don’t understand that no one is teaching you so the sounds stitch themselves into your brain like a map, directions back to a cemetery in Rachyn
i spent twenty years of my life picking at the threads before i taught myself to read the symbols that the stitches spelled out because my grandmother refused to teach me. twenty years of my life before i learned to read the names that I held in my body – poison or prayer? what’s the difference? they’re nestled there either way
at Keybar last night i meet a man named Emmanuel who also spent his birthday in the ER
he still has three bullets lodged in his body that are now part of his body
the body grows around foreign objects, the body will learn how to mix poison into a cocktail in your blood so your muscles don’t seize up, they adapt, they grow stronger
he tells me, “there’s one bullet here, still in my cheek.” he gestures, and then says
“you can feel it, if you want to.”
so i reach my hand out and gently touch the lump that he points at, next to his mouth
a small fragment of metal, gift wrapped up in tissue and nerve, securely buried under skin
a secret that you would never know was there unless you were looking for it
i am teaching myself the art of vyshyvanka because my grandmother never taught me and now it is a code that i am learning to decipher, another language i am conditioning my body to hold.
when i run my hand over the rows of my stitches i can feel something within me start to unravel – it’s not quite a release, more like a door opening. i don’t have the words for it in english and i doubt i ever will. but i can see the outlines of the word in Ukrainian and i can hear someone singing it, the faint notes of a folk song in a Boris Ivchenko film playing on the tv in the room down the hall. it’s the incoming track that the DJ is bringing in slowly, their finger hovering on the pitch fader like a trigger
i finish stitching the petals of the mallow flower and pause to reheat my coffee, pause to check the news again
brace my body as the timer of the microwave beeps like an air raid siren
everyday another wave of grief of unpredictable scale, crashing in with the tempestuousness of the sea
the only constant is that the wave always crashes, the only constant is that water hits shoreline water hits shoreline water hits shoreline
everyday another drone strike everyday another body pulled from the rubble of an apartment building
everyday another name that could have been mine, everyday another name that could belong to someone in my family who stayed in Ukraine and escaped the slaughter of the Holodomor, escaped stalin’s purges, escaped 70 years of soviet repression until finally the iron curtain came down like the end of a play, the end of the tragedy being acted by players in the theatre in Mariupol that once stood as a marvelous beacon
and now?
and now.
you would think that if you spelled out “Дети” (“children” in russian) so big and so clear that you can see it in the aerial photos, that it would have been enough
you would think that if if you spelled out “Дети” that that would be the red line not to cross, that that would be enough not to drop a bomb there
but you would be wrong. i wish you weren’t. i can’t make sense of it either.
the russians launched an attack on Kyiv last night: 600 drones, ballistic missiles, Oreshnik missiles
“russian attack on Kyiv, two killed 86 injured, including two children” reads a Ukrainska Pravda headline from several hours ago
an updated article from the Kyiv Independent lists the casualties as four killed, 100 injured
the number goes up every time i check it
four years since the full-scale invasion and i have learned more about military weapons than in all my years of life prior – Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles, Shahed drones, multiple-launch rocket systems, howitzers
a weapon is just a tool that you choose to use in a particular way
but a body belongs to a person whether or not a missile operator considers the body as belonging to a person, sees a person as a person
every dead person is still a person. we have to remember this. we have to remember this. we cannot grow numb to this. 100 people are injured. 4 people were killed. a number is a symbol that points at a life that is taken. every number is a symbol that points to a person. we write down their names and we say those names over and over again so their names stitch themselves into our brains and our bodies and we carry them with us. because it matters. we cannot let ourselves forget this. we cannot let ourselves forget them. we cannot grow numb to this. we cannot. it hurts because it matters. pick up the thread, make another stitch. now make another. now pick up your tools and start stitching the bombed buildings back together.
another day another wave of strikes on cultural institutions – the Kyiv Opera House, the Chornobyl Museum
more buildings that hold our art, our carefully preserved history, our stories our trauma our triumphs, our identity
up in flames once more
I watch a reel on Instagram of a man who says “this district has already been hit and rebuilt and reconstructed so many times. and now it is completely destroyed”
and now?
and now.
we do what we always do, we start rebuilding once more
how many days until the Opera House is stitched back together
how many days until we don’t need to keep stitching the Opera House back together once again
these things take time
resolution, repair, reconstruction
these things take time
i am so fucking tired
Ukraine is so fucking tired
this is an ugly stanza. i wish i had a better one for you.
war, as it turns out, is full of ugly stanzas.
i am so tired of digging through archives for the names of my family who lived, for the names of my family who did not live
i am tired and i keep digging because what other choice is there
these spirits have been crying out for my whole life and i carry these names in my body that are solid and heavy as bullets, lodged into my muscles that have grown stronger to hold them in
what does it mean to search for a family who might be dead already
the same thing it means to search for a family who might have survived
it is just what you do
i don’t have any other way to explain it
if i did i would have told you by now