Winter, 2020. I return to the village my parents come from and walk through places I have always loved — familiar, yet suddenly estranged, as if seen for the first time. I am rarely here in winter, and the silence reorders everything: space, time, distance.
No one is around. Only small houses and sheds — some abandoned, some slowly dissolving into grass and branches. Fifty kilometers from Kyiv — close in geography, distant in perception — the landscape feels like another planet.
I walk as an observer, and at the same time as someone this place once shaped, trying to understand what has changed in my memory — and why it still holds me.
No one is around. Only small houses and sheds — some abandoned, some slowly dissolving into grass and branches. Fifty kilometers from Kyiv — close in geography, distant in perception — the landscape feels like another planet.
I walk as an observer, and at the same time as someone this place once shaped, trying to understand what has changed in my memory — and why it still holds me.
