The second half of my virtual journal about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine — All of these stories were published on Medium before and then put together into this compilation. September 11, 2022 After a summer of frustrating news, for the last three days, my boyfriend(Serhii) and I have been feeling hysterically happy. The Ukrainian army has started its counteroffensive movement in Kharkiv Oblast and the Donbas…

That’s also a metaphor for anything that brings you joy but has no practical value. — Part I — how we’re having fun playing Zelda We’ve been playing the new Zelda game for two weeks. By that, I mean that every evening my boyfriend and I sit on a mattress (which lies on the floor), put Nintendo Switch in a dock, connect it to a big screen and spend a few hours playing the game. …

Here are my definitions of toxic masculinity based on the observations I made so far. — A few times a week, I go to a coffee shop called Pattern. On a weekday, you’ll find me sitting at a wooden table deep inside the dwelling with a black sign that says Work Here. On a weekend, I’ll be sitting on a brown Soviet couch by a huge…

and let my thoughts bounce off empty spaces — Sometimes I want to leave the bubble of my grey apartment (it’s lovely, it’s just painted grey) and enter the bubble of another place. To get out of my head. To get a new perspective. To feel less isolated and trapped in this non-peaceful time of my life. This usually…

And I stop expecting many many others. — I fell asleep at around 2 a.m. I woke up at around 3:30 a.m. It was a sequence of bright, yellow flares outside my window. They lightened up my bedroom. They filled it with an alarming noise. They were plenty. They were fast. They were scary. Serhiy (my boyfriend) stood…

Who knows when we’re getting them back? — I was watching Drive My Car and an airport came up on the screen at some point and I thought I do miss airports. I miss not one particular airport but the essence of it: what it means and brings into our modern human life. I miss the airport in…

United by rhythm, flow and sadness. I wrote them a few years ago after going on antidepressants for the first time. — In Isolation I’m empty like a bag of finished pretzels left on a couch – a footprint of binge-watching Netflix from 10 pm to 5 am. To be in isolation is a test. Not sure what’s being tested but I guess I’ve failed on every metric I got an F. Except for…

Write like a teacher; write like a believer; write like a serious writer; write like a rapper. — J.K. Rowling is a generation-forming writer. She transfigured millennials into generation HP, placed magic wands (books) in their hands and made reading magical. Now, generation HP grew up and realized that J.K. Rowling isn’t a wise magician — she’s just a person. As any person, she sometimes thinks controversial thoughts…

and feel the world with your feet — From a very very specific and microscopic angle, my life could be seen as a story of falling in and out of love with running. One season it’s in, one season it’s out — some years can go by with no running at all. …