On 24.02. the reality I believed in - people will not kill other people who have different world views - crashed.
The shock of the situation mobilized me physically into the mode of volunteer - help my family, friends, and friends of friends who were fleeing in order to survive, who were remaining to protect our Home, and those who couldn’t or didn’t want to flee. One and a half years later, I found myself on the road to my Hometown on the eastern side of Ukraine.
The last time I was here was in December 2021. Then my international friends were already alarmed by the media coverage of the troops standing at the border of my country, in close proximity to where I was. I didn’t believe they would cross. I didn’t believe they would shoot next to my mother’s house, which stands on the city’s border.
Why was I going home now? I felt the need not only to see my family but also to face the New reality. A reality where physical violence was possible and is happening right now.
When I was thinking about certain moments of the trip in Berlin, I thought they would make me cry. When the moment arrived - tears didn’t. I realize now that the reason for it is that the tears already happened - last year - those were the tears of grief for the reality that didn’t exist anymore.
Right now, I cried a few times. One, when I walked from the bus stop towards my temporary home in Uzhhorod. Those were the tears of happiness: I have the opportunity to be on my soil.
Second, in Kharkiv, when I saw a poster about the exhibition opening of the children’s artworks that happened on 21.02.2022 under the title “Almost Spring” - spring that never arrived. These were the tears of loss, and the final realization that one reality was shot and a new one needs to be constructed. But where does one start?
After making a love-medicine intervention and walking the streets of New Reality, I went to see my grandparents. Doing manual labour freed some part of me, so that when I came back to Kharkiv, - words, images, ideas, - started to pour through me.
Maybe one needs to come to the starting point for the new reality to get loaded through the action and time? But what to do with the threat to physical existence as an air alarm keeps crushing the cityscape during the day and night? Does the new reality contain acceptance of finite existence at any given moment?
I keep thinking - everything has a price. My life can be one of them.
This is what New Reality has to offer, yet again.
