by Iryna Tsilyk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Tetiana Savchynska

I have a recurring dream that has been haunting me in different variations for many years. In it, two people are walking side by side across a vast and snowy field. They carry backpacks (or rather, emergency go-bags) including all that remained from their former peaceful lives. The woman walks ahead of the man, and his big footprints cover hers so that it seems as if just one person has made their way across the field.

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by Lyubko Deresh
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

Before the seminar on NOMADLAND, he wrote to me: "Despite everything, I want us to do our work and to do it well." However, it seemed that fate had destined him to face the war head-on for a second time. My mom's call at 5:35am on February 24 woke me from a restless sleep. Before picking up the phone, I already knew what I was about to hear. "Sonny, the war has begun," my mom said through tears. "They are bombing Kyiv."

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By Agata Tumiłowicz-Mazur

I unfold a map in my mind and spread its crumpled edges wide. I know all my neighbors by heart, and I can say a lot about them. This storytelling is much like sitting down at a spinning wheel and beginning to work with a ball of yarn. You draw out long fibers: some made of stereotypes, followed by the histories you’ve been taught, others from accounts of your loved ones, and, finally, some you’ve experienced yourself.

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by Olga Breydo

What I do not know during that summer of 2020 is that nearly two years later, I will revisit this paragraph with regret for remembering Kharkiv instead of returning there when I had the chance. For imagining instead of experiencing. Planning instead of doing. And then I will write something again, but this time it will beis a longer piece.

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By Maryna Prykhodko

My heart sinks. I forgot. For a moment, I forgot—not about the war, which is impossible to forget, but about how close we are to death. It's right there, just tens of kilometers away. It feels wrong to even look at it. The enemy. The country that is trying to kill us. It's so close, looming over my beloved Kharkiv. What gives them the right?

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by Myroslav Laiuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Daisy Gibbons

How does our memory work? What does it choose? How do associations arise? How is trauma born and how does it mature? People will be going to therapists and psychiatrists, and even now Ukraine doesn’t have enough specialists in these professions. But first and foremost, each person will have to answer this question alone; many times; late at night.

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by Kateryna Iakovlenko

Seeing the photos of my house sent by my neighbors, I saw that nothing was left. I wanted to imagine that there might be my refrigerator where I had left a bottle of pét-nat wine from Odesa. I thought it would be a lovely “welcome home” drink, after all. Instead, only emptiness awaited me–dust and ashes.

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by Natalia A. Feduschak

According to another book I read, there was once a thriving lemon trade between Sicily and the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, now home to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees. I’ve thought of that trade when I purchase lemons from my regular vendor here at the local bazaar, although learning more about it doesn’t hold the interest it once might have.

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by Mariya Mykhaylova

Russian will always be my mother tongue, but Ukrainian is my homeland’s tongue. For me, at this moment, it is not about saying no to Russian–it is about saying yes to Ukrainian. I do not know what my future holds. For now, I stick to learning Ukrainian day by day as a way to feel whole.

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by Kateryna Iakovlenko

Ukraine is often referred to as part of Central-Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe, a post-Soviet country, and in conversations with my colleagues from Belgium, it has been called part of Eurasia. But none of these terms concisely reflect the interests and positions of the country's society, which in recent years has manifested in its unwillingness to submit to tyranny.

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by Markiyan Prokhasko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker

When the invasion began on 24 February 2022, I was struck by how angry the Russians were when they saw the asphalted roads in our northern villages. And once again I understood that, because they are unable to live like others, they want others to live like them.

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by Paula Erizanu

Since Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine, more than 370,000 Ukrainians have crossed the Moldovan border. About 100,000 Ukrainian refugees have decided to stay in the small country, half of them children, increasing Moldova's population by 4%. Relative to its size, Moldova has by far the highest refugee per capita in Europe.

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by Justina Dobush
Translated from the Ukrainian by Kate Tsurkan

I can’t even cry, because every fiber of my being is prepared for the worst 24/7. I decided to just forget that normal life is carrying on elsewhere. I do not allow myself to think that maybe soon it will all end, and I certainly do not believe that someday my life can continue the same as before.

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by Roman Malynovsky
Translated from the Ukrainian by Mykyta Moskaliuk

Once I asked my father about the story behind this tattoo. He told me that after serving in the Soviet army (which stripped young men of their identity as if they had never existed) he decided to get his name—Gena—tattooed on his hand, so as never to ever forget that he was not just a private or a sergeant but an actual person.

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by Judita Šalgo
Translated from the Serbian by John K. Cox

My first window on the world, several decades ago, looked out onto a wall, onto bulletin boards with newspapers. Now that I need to say what I see out this window, what’s there? The wall has been demolished; behind it yawns an abyss.

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by Alina Stefanescu

Ancient Sumerians spent their afterlives in eternity eating dust. Generous descendants would pour liquid into their ancestors' graves with clay pipes to unparch their lips, to moisten their mouths. Thus water was added to dirt, making soil: the breath of creation.

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by Omar Ayoub

Our histories are not limited to our encounters with oppression. Therefore, our stories, whether biographical or fiction, cannot be limited to our suffering. We are not, as Khalil Gibran asserts, half beings that fantasize about half hopes; we are wholes that exist.

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by Anastasiia Ovcharova
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

I remember our first meeting well. I was washing my hands with ice water in the procedure room when she came in to get acquainted, asking what language would be more convenient for me to speak. I replied that I understood both Ukrainian and Russian ​​very well, “So, you can speak what suits you better.”

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by Iryna Vikyrchak

Re-visiting the cities where you used to live, in reality, in is the most painful kind of tourism. Wherever you go, sooner or later your feet will betray you by taking the path they know, turning onto little streets they used to walk down and bring you on the familiar, yet forgotten routes.

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by Igor Pomerantsev
Translated from the Russian by Frank Williams

You have to be totally devoid of common sense not to believe in mystery. Mystery is there every step we take, literally under our noses. This is something every lathe operator who works with metal, every joiner who works with wood, every sculptor who works with hard, granular and liquid materials knows.

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