This night, I dreamt that the war has started. It was still some distance away, but closing up on me. My phone was inundated with the news: breaking news breaking in the middle of the broadcast with more breaking news. I felt panic. I was trying to decide, whether to run or stay put or rush to get more supplies. My children were getting scared, they begged for entertainment and I snapped at them. I woke up at 4:30 and didn’t want to go back to sleep. I was laying in the very quiet, dark night of a small Canadian town, in the warmth of my bed, in the enormity of winter, in the steady rhythm of my son’s feathery breaths and thought, how heartbreaking, I am one of those lucky few who can escape from bad dreams into reality.

And I felt that I understood, for the first time, why the ancients, the ones who were fortunate enough to survive the saline and be left unscarred by the wars, had such urge to make a bloody sacrifice upon bloody sacrifice to appease fickle gods and beg them not to take the good fortune away.

I met new people today. Meeting new people, truly meeting them, is always a miracle. Sometimes I feel that the things I do have only one true purpose – meeting people. I have few close friends, but an ever-growing multitude of people in my life, all of whom I love with various degrees of ferocity. There is always place for more.

I haven’t read many books since the emotional earthquake of Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me. This may be the longest and driest book hangover I’ve ever had and it may finally be over. Today I started A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar. I am only on page 30 or so, but I have the strangest feeling. I feel like this book touches the very core of my being. Every page or so, I stop and gasp for breath. Every little passage resonates with my own experience: a family trip to the consulate for visas, father’s love for his adult daughter, the daughter’s own experience of parenthood – everything is like a mirror held to my own life. I feel pulled in, but also genuinely scared to contindue reading. I’m afraid that whatever happens in this book, will somehow be personal for me. I suspect that it will open up the wounds that had not been healed, but had crusted over a long time ago.

A few months ago, my therapist, who is Jewish, recommended me a book about Holocaust that had had a huge impact on her. I feel that maybe the book I am reading now is similar. I don’t know what it would do to me.

The things that brought me comfort this week:

A long message from my old friend Natalya about the absurdity of the war

A poem Arguments for Peace by Ukrainian-American poet Oksana Maksymcuk. It starts with:

“How could there be a war in this city with cobblestone streets, glowing stars in the windows, festive dogs in felt deer antlers?”

The way this poem perfectly overlaps Natalya’s photos of Christmas festivities and charity fairs on the fourth winter of war.

The gratitude upon realising that I am not the only survivor.

Every time someone sent a heart in reply to a message.

I decided I will only be sending hearts from now on. In times like these, there can’t be too many hearts.

An email from Naomi after we had coffee together “I’ve added that book to my library list.” My library waitlist kin.

A man sitting next to me in a crowded coffee shop, typing away some quotes from Hannah Arendt.

I don’t even have to know you to be comforted by you.

Today, for the first time in all the years, I didn’t go back to work on the very first day after Christmas break. I stayed home with kids, just the three of us, doing nothing worth remembering. It was wonderful. Little by little, I am trying to teach myself what is important and what only seems to be. My kids know it better than I do.

Like last year, I start January with a stack of books that I randomly picked in the local library. This year’s selection includes I who never knew men, Le mage de Kremlin, Hamnet and Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives that I probably won’t read after all.

Also, I am feeling an insatiable desire to draw. For now, I am just copying the photos of different animals from my kids Anthology of nature, but who knows, maybe one day I’ll have an idea of my own. The watercolour pencils I bought on a whim (or intuition?) in December, bring me so much pure and inexplicable joy that I just secretly splurged on two more pencil sets of different brands. I have no artistic ambition besides giving my soul any kind of nourishment it asks for.

January 1 is the year’s equivalent of 5am in the morning. The same dazed stillness and the same feeling of expansive possibility that may or may not be an illusion.

I’ve filled the day with modest firsts. The first page of a new journal, the first walk. The first bird I spotted this year is brown creeper. I’ve decided to keep a journal and a tally of the birds I meet and I have no idea if any of these micro-resolutions will stick, but I find comfort in these small things.

I almost prefer November to October, because now we’ve done the active dying part and can be at peace with death.

A few remaining leaves will detach from their branches and fall quietly, some time in the dark that now takes a bigger part of the day.

After the heartbreak of October comes the slumber. It’s the giving up of something you can no longer hold on to. It is dispossession and liberation.

It is a good time to let go of the expectations, just before the countdown, before an arbitrary frontier between old and new year jerks us back to the wishing/hoping mode.

Rest well.

The neighbourhood is dressed in fog for the second day in a row. I love the fog, its elusiveness, the self-assured way it swallows the street and the forest behind it, the way it gives in as I approach, revealing just enough. What it reveals is that the trees, overnight, became more orange than green. If it were in broad sunlight, I would call it autumn, but through the fog’s thin grey veil all I see is the death of summer. How considerate, I say to myself, to mute the colours and smooth the edges, to slow the time, to accompany the grief and the transition. Long time ago, when I lived by the Mediterranean Sea, I once saw a fog so dense, it looked like stepping inside a white cloud. I remember slowly walking to a particular spot that I knew opened a view on the salt marches and the sea beyond them and saw nothing, only white. And I thought, this would be the nicest end of the world one could imagine. It was in 2012, so we were all thinking about the end of the world anyway.

Since then, every time there is a fog, I am thinking about the end of the world.

By chance, Louise asked this morning about shape of water we are. A loaded question. First, I wanted to answer ice. Cold and brittle, worried, uneasy. But after giving it some thought, I’ll say fog. Sad and hopeful, clinging to the skin of the warm-bodied creatures for comfort.

I took my kids to my favourite spot to watch the sunset yesterday. We arrived just in time and stayed as long as we could, surrendering to the ancient feeling of wonder. I didn’t have my phone with me to avoid the temptation of buying anything, even ice-cream. So, instead of taking the pictures of sunset, I watched the sunset in a pure state of un-consumption.

It was around 9pm local time, 4 am in Kyiv, on the middle of the five or eight hours of relentless air raid sirens and explosions. Was I supposed to know it then? Would it be better if I knew? Grief is a privilege of a survivor or someone who had left long ago, before everything happened, before they knew, and never found their way back.

I didn’t know what to do with my free afternoon, so I went for a walk hoping that the walk will end with a glass of iced latte . Now I am sitting at the edge of the Watermill Lake, staring at the shimmering brown water. At the things beneath the water: the stones covered with soft algae or moss and the fallen branches. I am thinking how these branches used to be creatures of air, used to be addicted to light, homes for the birds, highways for squirrels. Now, after their first death, the live underwater, surrounded by algae, small fish and tadpoles. Some trees reincarnate as soil. Some become water creatures. None disappear. When I started writing this, I had no idea it was about afterlife.