story 1
We’re on our way to Ukraine, my friend and I, taking the Düsseldorf–Lviv bus. The whole trip lasts thirty-three hours, and the first “long” stop — a very official twenty minutes — comes only after fourteen hours on the road.
Right behind us sit a mother and her little boy, maybe six or seven years old.
The driver announces the long-awaited break, and the boy immediately turns to his mom, eyes wide with excitement:
“Oh! We have a whole twenty minutes — that means we can play hide-and-seek three times!”
riding with my friend on the Düsseldorf–Lviv bus, the first “long” stop (exactly 20 minutes) comes about fourteen hours after the start of the trip.
Right behind us sit a mother and her son, maybe seven or eight years old.
The boy (to his mom): “Oh, we have twenty minutes — that means we have time to play hide-and-seek three times.”
story 2
For For the last month and a half, I’ve been constantly thinking about that paradoxical state of happiness and unhappiness at the same time — its controversial nature. Maybe adulthood is about stoicism and learning to somehow hold all of it inside, to experience it, analyze it, and keep functioning. Drink water, put cream on your skin before going to sleep, eat proper food, I don’t know.
But the truth is, I still have no idea how to be an adult.
I arrived at Lviv train station on Tuesday morning; the sun was shining. I immediately felt that the country sounded and looked different — and not because of the sirens. Forty percent of the people in uniform. Ukrainian music was playing from the little restaurant by the station. I waited to be picked up with all my artworks I was bringing from Berlin. And while I literally couldn’t move, I spent about an hour listening to the playlist of that station restaurant, where, by the way, you could get an amazing coconut latte, Arabica, or a blend. The thing is, that in Ukraine, you can get an unbelievably good coffee in even the tiniest corner café — on the outskirts, at the train station, anywhere — where they’ll ask you “Arabica or blend?”, offer ten different kinds of organic milk, and make coffees no one here in Germany has even heard of. It’s something I truly miss. The music fell into three types: uplifting, melancholic, and radically angry. The country sounded different.
Two solo exhibitions in two cities over two weeks. Relatives. Teachers. Students. Friends. Men. Loved ones from different corners of the country. I received many flowers. Explosions and sleeping in the corridor. I get scared of every siren, go to the shelter — several times a day. Exhausting. People with prosthetics. Funerals. Flowers with grandmothers, as always — it’s cherry and strawberry season. Now a kilo costs 100 UAH, when I was still here it was only 50. Rain. I got soaked because the funicular wasn’t working, because of the blockout. In moments like that, the electricity cuts out at random — no warning, no way to prepare, no chance to plan anything — and in Ukraine, it happens far more often than you’d think. So, the power went out, and I had to walk uphill through Mariinsky Park with water dripping into my sneakers. Why does rain feel pleasant at home? Donations. I closed the fundraiser. Food. Really delicious Ukrainian food. My friends have children. She’s pregnant, they’re getting married, he now has a dog, she passed her driving test and bought a car. This changes the dynamics of our meetings — we’re kind of adults now.
Evenings of remembrance for fallen soldiers, where I recognize people. I studied with them once; we’re the same age. There’s Marichka — I’m proud of her — she used to play apartment gigs in our student space on the dorm’s first floor. Now everyone listens to her. Now we listen to her, sitting in a bar on Podil. She plays Ivan’s favorite songs on guitar; all his friends sit quietly, and between songs they take turns at the mic to tell his favorite jokes. His girlfriend is here too; she smiles. The only thing that reminds you this isn’t a birthday — a photo of the hero in uniform on the bar, surrounded by flowers and candles, and, of course, his absence. I don’t know how. He should be here.
Opposite the gallery in Kyiv where I had the Archipelago exhibition, there’s a memorial wall. A small number of photos of the heroes, and opposite them an equally small number of plastic candles without flames. We are installing the artworks; I step out to smoke, I look at the wall. This cannot be true.
I returned to Germany by bus — a 44-hour ride. The driver lost the bus’s technical passport; we had to stand in line twicex, which means about 24 hours.
I arrived and got a haircut the next evening. My friend cut it — three strokes, without regret, so short as I never had before.
The only way to get through German traffic lights is to have someone to kiss while you wait for the green light.
the last month and a half, I’ve been constantly thinking about that paradoxical state of happiness and unhappiness at the same time — its controversial nature. Maybe adulthood is about stoicism and learning to somehow hold all of it inside, to experience it, analyze it, and keep functioning. Drink water, put cream on your skin before going to sleep, eat proper food, I don’t know.
But then I don’t know how to be an adult, because I still don’t know how.
I arrived at Lviv train station on Tuesday morning; the sun was shining. I immediately felt that the country sounded and looked different — and not because of the sirens. Forty percent of the people in uniform. Ukrainian music was playing from the little restaurant by the station. I waited to be picked up with all my artworks I was bringing from Berlin. And while I literally couldn’t move, I spent about an hour listening to the playlist of that station restaurant, where, by the way, you could get a coconut latte, Arabica, or a blend. The music fell into three types: uplifting, melancholic, and radically angry. The country sounded different.
Two solo exhibitions in two cities over two weeks. Relatives. Teachers. Students. Friends. Men. Loved ones from different corners of the country. I received many flowers. Explosions and sleeping in the corridor. I get scared of every siren, go to the shelter — several times a day. Exhausting. People with prosthetics. Funerals. Flowers with grandmothers, as always — it’s cherry and strawberry season. Now a kilo costs 100 UAH, when I was still here it was only 50. Rain. I got soaked because the funicular wasn’t working. The power went out, and I had to walk uphill through Mariinsky Park with water dripping into my sneakers. Why does rain feel pleasant at home? Donations. I closed the fundraiser. Food. Real, delicious Ukrainian food. My friends have children. She’s pregnant, they’re getting married, he now has a dog, she passed her driving test and bought a car. This changes the dynamics of our meetings — we’re kind of adults now.
Evenings of remembrance for fallen soldiers, where I recognize people. I studied with them once; we’re the same age. There’s Marichka Chuprienko — I’m proud of her — she used to play apartment gigs in our student space on the dorm’s first floor. Now everyone listens to her. Now we listen to her, sitting in a bar on Podil. She plays Ivan’s favorite songs on guitar; all his friends sit quietly, and between songs they take turns at the mic to tell his favorite jokes. His girlfriend is here too; she smiles. The only thing that reminds you this isn’t a birthday — a photo of the hero in uniform on the bar, surrounded by flowers and candles, and, of course, his absence. I don’t know how. He should be here.
Opposite the gallery in Kyiv where I had the Archipelago exhibition, there’s a memorial wall. A small number of photos of the heroes, and opposite them an equally small number of plastic candles without flames. We are installing the artworks; I step out to smoke, I look at the wall. How?
I returned to Germany by bus — a 44-hour ride. The driver lost the bus’s technical passport; we had to stand in line twice.
I arrived and got a haircut the next evening. My friend cut it — three strokes, without regret.
The only way to get through German traffic lights is to have someone to kiss while you wait for the green light.
story 3
When I arrived in Germany, all the furniture we had was given to us by locals. I say we because at that time I began living with my mother again. It wasn’t a conscious decision or my desire — it was about the need to support her. She drove out of Saltivka on the third day of the war, literally under shelling and through blocked roads, with no way of knowing who had put up those checkpoints.
I didn’t think about what I wanted my room to look like. It didn’t matter. Besides, there was this constant feeling that very soon I would leave, that this wasn’t my life, not my home — and so any sense of attachment to the place where I’ve now lived for three years has remained numb. Numbness has soaked into many parts of my heart. It happened like a slow flood: gradually, sector by sector, it drowned my love, my passions, the person I used to be.
Any joy I felt about things here, abroad, came with shame — guilt for being safe, and everything that comes with it.
I remember how my mother got covid then, and I was the one searching through and selecting the furniture our host’s friends offered us. We went from apartment to apartment taking photos, and on weekends we rented a trailer and drove through the small towns around Düsseldorf to pick up what people had given us.
Kitchen cabinets we couldn’t install for a long time because we didn’t know how, so we kept the food and dishes in the dishwasher. A kitchen table that’s actually a wooden coffee table that stains too easily. Closets. A blue armchair that for a long time replaced a man’s embrace. At some point I couldn’t get through a day without quietly sitting in that chair in the evening — I had never felt this kind of love for a piece of furniture.
I remember that in the beautiful apartment of an elderly German lady, there was a bed — a “one-and-a-half,” as they call it. The apartment was full of landscapes, two record players, ceramic vases, flowered wallpaper — everything had flowers — and there was that bed. It wasn’t particularly pretty, but it was the perfect size. I remember that I could barely feel anything then, but at least the desire to sleep on a big bed felt understandable. After five years of living in a dorm and sleeping on a narrow bunk bed, obviously.
But my mother and our host were against it. They convinced me not to take the bed for aesthetic reasons — because it was “so ugly.” Instead, we chose a pretty single bed from IKEA. And I didn’t think of that story very often afterwards.
Yet at the same time, over these three years I’ve so often caught myself thinking that I don’t know what I want, where I’m going, what I want to wear, what I want to eat, whether I like this artwork, what kind of relationship I want, where I want to live, what I want to do, what my opinion is on anything. A kind of confused indifference settled into many areas of my life. And most of what I’ve done in these years was more an attempt not to lose my mind, to force myself to move — slowly, but at least move. And I tried to be useful.
Doubts about my art accompany me constantly. The feeling of being torn from Ukraine and at the same time foreign here, in Germany; the fear of dissolving into local ideas about art and, in parallel, the fear of repeating myself, of standing still; material worries; the multilayered fatigue; the helplessness in the face of bureaucratic structures and the inability to influence anything — all of it pushes me farther and farther from something as simple as knowing what I want to eat for dinner.
I used to think about love so often, and I think I used to love so strongly. That love felt bright and specific. People, processes, life — I wrote about it in my diary, I gave thanks, I was spontaneous and fearless. I constantly wanted things. Many things. Before the war started. And now it’s so hard — to want anything at all.
As a child, wanting is so easy. I don’t know whether it’s adulthood or the wrong decisions that create this inner deafness and detachment.
And yet this story has a happy ending. Yesterday my boyfriend and I installed a big bed in my room. It had been planned for a while — so that it would be comfortable for us to sleep together in my room. When I saw the big bed, it wasn’t just a bed. I felt a deep, pure joy, as if I returned to myself a little. That’s when I suddenly remembered this whole story.
Maybe deep inside we always know what we truly want or don’t want, and sometimes it’s important to fight for our desires, even if someone doesn’t like it. Otherwise, you lose your taste for life and end up living without love. First there’s the war, then all these trends, hypes, news, fashion. So many things influence us, especially through Instagram — we so often feel not enough.
One night in this bed reminded me that I’m still alive.
At least as long as I sleep in this bed.
My boyfriend and I broke up four months later.