A lot has happened since 2022! Three years and six months.

I had been planning a trip to India with two friends and then I was displaced first to Prague and then here to Berlin. Three months after I got my official place here I did indeed go to India for ten days (instead of three months) in Kerala. I had been to northern India before the pandemic. I had walked in the foothills of the Himalayas and I had seen Sikkim and those northern provinces, but not spent much time in Darjeeling nor crossed into Bhutan 🇧🇹 as I had wished.

After ten days in Kerala, most spent on a beach area watching the fishermen and other people working, I returned to Berlin. Here I’ve a very small apartment, a building on Rathenaustrasse. It’s home, nothing like home like before. Last year within weeks of each other my boyfriend and my Dad were killed in the war. Life has changed dramatically and drastically for me and I have been struggling to show the resilience my people are known for.

It is so very easy to get lost in music. It was my major at my university, the Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music. I can play several instruments but lately I’ve added the electric guitar to this repertoire. I’m surviving on the notes of my music, the sounds of my anguished mind and life just now. I’m hoping the mindlessness of social media might distract me too.