places we can call home
As I sit across from a more than acquaintance but less than friend, images of his home flash in front of my eyes. It’s a point of connection in a way, showing me the snow-covered outskirts of Russia, as he mentions that his last trip there was in January of 22, just a month before it happened. I stare at the digitized snow absentmindedly, thinking of the fact that my youth meant that I did not yet know the value in taking pictures of a place I had always assumed I would have access to. Ironic, that it’s the winter scenes that we bond over, as Ukraine has been frozen in one for over three years.
He then asks me whether I would call London my home.
No matter how many years I have spent here, I always introduce myself as Ukrainian. Nonetheless, I respond that I suppose I have to call this place my home, based on the amount of time that I have dedicated to it. He, despite having spent 13 years of his life here, disagrees. Russia will always be his real home, a place he used to visit bi-annually, one that he has been denied access from due to his conscription which arrived just months prior. Despite him being half-Ukrainian, which he constantly ensures to remind me of, he runs the Russian-speaking club of his university holding on dearly to his mother tongue and the feeling of home and community. No matter which side of the war his family now sits, Russia is what he feels most connected to.
In his eyes I see the same longing that I perhaps used to share, the desperate wanting to return to a place of comfort that you are being kept from. This longing had settled into me slightly before him, my last visit to Ukraine being in 2019. The real answer to his question hangs over me, which is that I have been compelled to call London my home, because if I do not I am left entirely without one. The Ukraine whose permanence I had mistakenly assumed is now long gone. The Ukraine of my childhood, of my first ever memories and experiences has now been erased.
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I can only ever return to the ashes of the sunflower field that me and my mother had once stopped by, the car slightly tilted on the uneven road as we picked each seed from its center. In the same way, the war has picked out my friends and family, whether by pushing them out to safer cities and countries, or taking their lives entirely. Now all that remains is a wilted hollowness, the echoes of our laughter quickly drowned out by the sound of sirens. This is all that my first home has been reduced to, a collection of phantom memories. A birthplace, still referenced on my new citizenship certificate, but a place I no longer recognise from the bombing sites I see through the pixels of my screen and the tears that blur them. All I have the power to do is sit in the guilt of my safety, cocooned in what and who I have lost. No matter how much nostalgia my mind can muster up, I cannot call piles of debris, rubble, cracked glass and dead bodies my home.
I have learned to love London, and appreciate it for all the opportunities and safety that it gives me. I too have learned to carry my guilt with me, for being lucky enough to have never once experienced the war first hand, even if the pain, loss and separation are overbearing. Much how the war has solidified my version of Ukraine in ashes, the distance created by growing up in a foreign place has stunted me to the rest of my family. All they can see is a layered shadow, like that of pencil under layers of watercolour, of my twelve-year-old sunny self, eager to run, climb, dance and sing her way through life. We meet each other’s eyes with sadness, being unable to cope with the fact that both the twelve year old girl and the streets that she was so thrilled to run on are now gone.
We meet again in the close enough, but not at all the same lands of Poland, where the traffic lights all work and there are no ringing sounds of air raids. Trapped in the mausoleum of my former self I am once again reminded of the fact that I have an accent in each language I speak, even my mother tongue. There is a new language however, that we all share without learning, where each sentence carries with it an outline of what once was. It’s the same language we speak in Ukrainian events held in London, as we all gather to preserve tradition and culture and to share the weight of what lies thousands of kilometers away.
Ukraine is hard to write or even talk about because I can no longer translate the moments and memories in my mind into anything tangible. Before, I used to advertise tours of my city, back when there had been physical places to attach to. I could take someone by the hand and drag them back with me, naming the places where I had my first kiss, or the place where I had first broken a bone, showing each street corner where the founding pieces of my identity were forged.
Now, the only one being dragged back is me, crushed under the weight of guilt and memory. The waves crash against the inside of my skull as the many tears I shed are never enough to provide any release. Images shift constantly, just solid enough to haunt me, and yet too elusive to ever hold. No description of any moment, like feeling my feet sinking in the warm, muddy lake I visited annually with my family, or being carried under the shade of trees by my aunt can ever amount to a true definition of home. I am both terrified by the shards of memory that are left and yet desperate to hold onto them.
Home now comes, occasionally, in a brown box that has been heavily rifled through, the sweets inside never quite potent enough to fill the empty pit that forms with the understanding that what once has been can never really be returned to.
