life in-between
short notes on coming home
I said goodbye to my love just before dawn, I don’t remember the weather, in my mind it was raining. They closed the doors on the train and the train sat on the tracks for 10 minutes, a delay nearly unheard-of in Ukraine, where even now the cars almost always lurch forward on a precise schedule.
The delay made my departure less a scene from a romantic drama, more a sitcom. I stood in the train’s corridor, awkwardly gazing at him out the window, occasionally shrugging, not sure what to do.
Finally, the car started to move.
One last wave, one last blown kiss, one last glimpse of the city where I’d lived for over two-and-a-half years. Then I lay on the narrow bunk, smiled at the old couple sharing the compartment, closed my eyes and, for most of the ten-hour journey to Poland, just slept. My life in two suitcases. Not knowing what would come next.
I didn’t want to leave, I couldn’t stay, I don’t know where I belong. I don’t know what will come. Maybe goodbye is goodbye. Maybe forever, or not for so long.
The journey back to Canada sticks in my memory as a strange kaleidoscope. A train to Chełm, just over the Polish border, a long grey wait by the tracks, and then a train into Warsaw. An Uber to an airport hotel, where I stayed for exactly three hours, and then a cab to the airport, a flight to Amsterdam, another to Halifax.
Customs. Canadian accents. “Are you bringing anything back?” Another flight, this one to Toronto. Another airport hotel, where my sister came to see me and I was so exhausted I could barely keep her face in focus or formulate a coherent sentence. At last, I boarded a plane for Winnipeg, drifted off in my seat, woke up to see the prairie spreading under our wings.
It took me over two months to feel like I actually lived here again.
In retrospect, running away from Canada for awhile was sort of easy. Coming back has been busy. As it turns out, there are a million things you need to repair or redo after so long away: banking, phone contracts, relationships with friends. A million tiny errands: new passport. New health card. Insurance, license, three years of late taxes.
I unpacked my things, slowly. I slept a lot. The last three months in Ukraine, under near-nightly bombardments, I had almost entirely stopped sleeping. It was obvious that I needed to leave, by then. I went back to work at the Winnipeg Free Press and started easing into the rhythm of my job.
I don’t know. It hasn’t been easy. I’m sorry I’ve been quiet here for so long. I kept trying to keep up with these, kept starting drafts, kept coming up with topics for a newsletter, and then just turning my laptop off.
I was, to be honest, exhausted. something else. I’m not depressed, it’s nothing like that — if anything, I feel stronger and more grounded than I have since before my father died.
But something has shifted. I’m not the same person I was when I left Winnipeg. I’m not sure in what ways, but I can feel it — the things that used to seem important no longer do. I’m not pushing myself to understand that yet, I’m just trying to take care of myself and establish some new routines. Everything will be clear in time.
Anyway.
I mostly write this as an update because the guilt of not doing this has been destroying me. Going forward: I will keep writing here, and I will try my best to do it more often. This may be tricky: I’m back at the Free Press full time, and I also have a large project that will be taking up most of my free time through the rest of this year and the first half of 2026. I can’t wait to tell you about it when it’s time, but that time isn’t quite yet. It will be soon.
With that in mind: if you have a paid subscription, please cancel it. (Here’s info on how to do that.) Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all your support these last two-and-a-half years. If it hadn’t been for that, nothing I’ve been able to do, or this big project I’m so excited about, would have been possible.
Finally: it’s Remembrance Day in Canada on Tuesday. One thing I definitely know is that it resonates with me a lot more now than it did before I went to Ukraine. In this weekend’s Free Press, I wrote a column about the most thought-provoking memorial I’ve ever seen.
-mm