I woke up at 3:30 a.m. this morning, when a nightmare urged me awake. I don’t know why, but it’s been happening a lot, these days. This one was standard nightmare stuff. Impending doom. A nuclear missile, or else a meteor, was shrieking towards us from the sky. It came as a deafening roar, a blinding orange light. “Run,” a woman shouted, and so we started running. But there was nowhere to run, and we could not see where we were going, and with every step we took the heat and pressure were building, until it seemed as if the whole world was ablaze.
At that moment, a very clear thought crossed my mind.
What if this is just a dream?
Figuring that this thought was my only chance to survive, my dream-self squeezed my eyes shut, and willed myself back to real life. Next thing I knew, I was lying amidst the white clouds of my sheets, and all was calm. I fumbled to check the air raid app on my phone; no alerts. Safe. Kyiv slept peacefully, and soon, I did too.
Briefly, I wondered if that thought — what if this is just a dream? — can happen in both states. If it was real, would you think the same? But in reality, I suppose, you wouldn’t know it was coming. As they say, you never hear the one that gets you.
Anyway, that’s typical nightmare stuff. Usually, the ones I have every few nights these days are more subtle, slight variations on the same theme. In that one, my dad is alive again. Not still alive, as in existing in a continuity of life, but again, as in returned from the undiscovered country. These nightmares are gentle. He’s at home, he’s in bed or in his office, he’s frail but normal and not a zombie. We talk. We laugh. We catch him up on everything he’s missed since he left over four years ago.
At first, it’s good to see him there, in the hazy world in-between. It’s good to hear his voice again, good to see the way his eyes twinkle right before he makes a joke. Yet it’s these dreams, more than any others, that fill me with a dread I cannot stomach. It’s in how aware I am that the dream will end at any moment. To sleep, perchance to dream, Hamlet said; but maybe he had it the wrong way ‘round. Maybe the dream comes first.
Careful dad, I warn him, every time. Take it easy. You should rest. It could happen again.
I hate those dreams. I hate them, and yet they don’t go away. It’s too wrenching to see him alive again, knowing what I didn’t then: that he, like all of us, is fragile. Knowing, even in the dream, what comes next. That sooner or later, his heartbeat will falter, and then I’ll be back at the first way-station on the road of grief, back to the place I was on that bleak day in 2019. And if that moment does not come in the dream, then certainly it will come when I wake. Certainly, there will be those first few seconds when I wake, when the veil between real and imagined is still translucent, and I will feel the void in my gut, and even for a flicker, live the loss of him again.
I hate those dreams, because even when my eyes are open, there is no escape.
— — —
I had a bike once. I bought it in 2010, when I got my first paycheque from my first permanent full-time job at the Free Press. I thought it might be fun to have a bike, having not ridden one since I was a kid. But after a few unsteady trips to the Forks along the Assiniboine River, I realized I found Winnipeg’s streets too scary to ride. From that point on my bike was mostly awkward furniture, and a magnet for dust.
That bike is gone now. In the months before I came back to Ukraine, I packed up my apartment. I spent hours agonizing over what little I could bring with me — one pair of boots, some thermal underthings, a few cute dresses for date nights — and what of the rest to keep in storage, what to sell, and what to throw away. It was a painful time, hard to choose. Some nights, I sat amidst boxes of things, and cried.
Selling the bike was the hardest, and I struggled to understand why. I hadn’t ridden it in years, and after a theft attempt from my parking garage a few months prior, it had a damaged chain. Yet every time I tried to put it up for sale on Facebook Marketplace, I hesitated. “I can’t sell my bike,” I’d say, sometimes out loud to myself. “It’s my bike.”
In the end, I knew the bike had to go. I found a buyer quickly, at a fair price. He came by a few hours later, checked it out, transferred me the money. Yet as he began to take it out the door, I hesitated. I felt sick, as if I was losing something precious, as if I was making a mistake. I shoved that feeling down, and watched him wheel it away.
But as soon as the door closed, something surprising happened: I never thought about my bike again. Not once, right until this moment. In fact, I’d sort of forgotten I owned a bike. In retrospect, the struggle I felt selling it seems silly. It meant nothing to me.
This is the part of my move to Ukraine I did not anticipate. For 384 days, I haven’t thought about my stuff, not once. I haven’t thought about my television, or my car. Haven’t thought about my clothes or my books or my dishes or my art, for which I paid a large sum of money to get framed, and no longer really know why. I haven’t thought about my mattress, or my books, or my collection of souvenir magnets.
Indeed, I’ve found, it’s been almost liberating to be without those things, to live in an Air B’n’B apartment with little but the tacky horse paintings on the walls. It’s freeing to realize that home can be anywhere I want to make it, not through my possessions, but through memories and simple presence. For years, I’d cultivated an environment that felt like a nest, finding comfort in gathering things around me. Turns out,
This is the first lesson Ukraine taught me, before I’d even left. It’s a lesson that goes for both things and people, and it starts with the fact you’re not the things you have; you’re not the things you own. That’s common enough advice. But from there, came another realization, one that, I realized, describes my journey with grief too.
It’s never the being without that’s the hardest. That part, you can manage. Something leaves, or someone, but life goes on. You go to work, you make dinner, you have warm conversations with friends, you feel the sun on your skin, you find joy again. Bit by bit, the empty place in your life fills in. Not completely, maybe, but in time, the hole it left behind isn’t gaping enough to suck you in.
So no, it’s not the being without that’s the hardest part.
It’s always the letting go.
— — —
Okay, so I’ve learned that lesson, and it’s been helpful in contemplating loss, both past and future. That presents another problem: once you’ve built a life rich enough to hold you, it hurts to think of letting it go. Which brings me to the question that friends and friendly readers have been asking — and which, to be honest, I’ve been asking myself.
When am I coming home?
Long story short, I don’t have a good answer. What I know, right now, is that I have a life here in Ukraine that still interests me, that still feels as if it has something to say, something to give me, something to offer. I’m not ready to let go of the life I’ve found here, good and bad; I’m not ready to say goodbye to my friends, to this country, or the work and the ideas I have for stories that are still swirling in my head.
So yeah, I’m not coming back this month. I don’t know exactly when I’ll be returning. It depends on a number of factors, including finances. As of now, I plan to stay until the end of the summer, and assess the situation closer to then.
In the meantime, I’m talking to Free Press editors about doing a little more for the paper — not just on Ukraine, but maybe dipping my toes back into the old regular columns too. I was right that I needed a break, a long one. Lately, I’ve been feeling motivated to write again, and that feels very hopeful.
— — —
Not to keep beating this drum, but a side note.
Last month, the Los Angeles Times laid off 115 people, a deep chop which, combined with a previous round of layoffs last year, means its newsroom has shrunk by about a third in under 12 months. In this latest move, the paper — which employs one of the best photojournalists in the world, and produces some remarkable journalism — lost many of the keys any media outlet needs to survive the future.
It shut its entire Washington, D.C. bureau in a presidential election year. It also laid off its only Latino columnist; at least one Pulitzer winner; and the young reporter at the helm of its successful TikTok, which was reaching the next generation of media consumers where they’re at.
The warning lights for the future of information are blinking red. What will be left, when the dust settles?