a Kind of Refugee / 03.04.2022

there is a war going on in Ukraine. complete with horrors that i can hardly wrap my head around let alone stomach.

i see it i hear it i know it but i don’t feel it.

Bucha. this is where today’s photos are from. the people are lying on the ground. we see their fingers curled permanently, hands tied. they are dead.

my grandparents told me that after the war was over the soviets came to their DP camp to take back and repatriate “their” people. and our people, the ukrainians, didn’t want to go. some of them committed suicide.

as a child i took this as fact: some people took their own lives so as not to go back “home” with the soviets.

later i began to wonder: what could be so awful that you’d rather die than find out? could there really be something so horrible that you can’t slip away, luck out, get by?

today i sift through the photos and see: this has happened. already.

while i’ve been trying to find $100,000 to buy a party of bulletproof vests. or tourniquets. or underwear. while i’ve been carefully composing my sentences and emails and trying to find ways to direct your desire to help toward concrete tasks.

this has happened. in Bucha.

and it has happened before.

and now it has happened again.

not only in Bucha.

not feeling is a survival mechanism. resilience is when you can see and you can feel and you can act and those things are related again. but the mind and the body do not see or feel or act to their full capacity — this keeps you from losing your mind or losing your life. sometimes.

maybe it’s because i’m far from Bucha or because i’m numb from intergenerational trauma or because i’m protected by affluence (or even association with affluence) that i don’t feel Bucha.

but my grandmother felt Bucha. that’s why she didn’t go “home” till 1975. that’s why she made sure i’d be born in the US.

and in the first days of march she knew there was a problem. she knew i had a problem. (but i know that you, wherever you are, have a problem too.) this is WAR. these are landmines. is there anything more horrible than landmines?

landmines turn mobility into a liability.