As me cousin said: “Dyaki” on his fourth birthday, I discovered I might be allergic to spring. As it forgot to arrive, or, rather, I didn’t have a chance to arrive into it back in 2022. As couples step outside to hold each other, I rush inside to hold me-self. Just for a week, till everything settles, and the scar of that stolen spring stops itching that hard. Till I will be able to explain to me friend, why is that I am glitching when someone says: “Enjoying the Spring”. The answer fully formed itself by 24.02.2026, in the form of Lilac.
Lilac
I feel that living with war (or other inner wounds), you never know what would set you off. This time around, as honestly, other few years before, it was, - lilac. Its purple color and sweet aroma brings me to the doorstep of me grandparents’ house, which used to be a summer house of me great-granddad. I never met him, but as I type these words, I think of him, of the lilacs, and what it means to be able to pass a house with a garden to your kin. Would I be able to? Would you? And what it means to have a Land on which you have a chance to build a Home of your own?
A few days later, me grandma sends me a picture: “Lilac is blossoming.” I reply: “It’s beautiful. Each time I see a lilac blossom, I think of our House.” She follows: “Me too.”
Each of us has a different coping mechanism. Mine, - inventing ways to tell this story. For some parts, I use this typewriter, the backstory of which I told in an earlier piece, that I sent to an Open Call at the end of March, and that I am about to read in Berlin next Tuesday. For the other parts, I use lines on paper, acrylics on canvas, while for others, - digital symbols, called emojis. This labour division between different media departments, truly, helps. Rest is, indeed, a change of labour. Me inner dad can be proud of me.
At the same time, I am learning to let people in and share when I can, what I feel, if I can find words, or metaphors for it. So far, the best one I have is that living with war is like living with cancer, meaning, you are aware of the ticking clock inside you. In the beginning of the full-scale war, or simply put, - war, part two, for me, I would allow me self to take time to digest the incoming news. Four years in, and the muscles of the heart seem to be able to perform this task on a background. The system has been upgraded. It took three rounds of angina, followed by bronchitis. Now I became health-aware to the max, as I take cheesecake breaks, morning and evening reading, between the rounds of incoming takes on this one long story. As one other big task, has been accepting one’s fragility, while learning to let others to hold your hand, or pat you on a back as you try to compose yourself together after discovering that, at times, certain sounds mixed with a crowd, makes you feel unsafe, while also sad and ashamed, as you can’t share with your friend that moment of dancing in a tight space, where rhythm and bodies become one wave, you discover, here, you might be not liquid, but rather, hardly shaped stone in this ocean. And so you learn once again: to accept yourself and your new charted waters.
Back in 2024, more precisely on 14.04.2024, I wrote: “whenever I get scared, I remember, - me ancestors are with me.” So I enter the store for a marker - 239 /Lilac - as a promise to me, to me family, to the House and Home, - to be.
yours, Kharkiv romantic
26(24).04 - 27.02.2026, Berlin
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Original drawing by the author available for your collection:
10.8 x 14.5 cm, markers on paper, for inquiries: [email protected]