Life on the exhale

Life on the exhale is like knocking on a door, it carries an echo, and wakes up the dormant. People to whom it is written, like Victoria Amelina, transcend what we usually can, and what in Ukrainian is expressed by the word mohty. In truth, Vika, seeking justice, a home and a future, bore witness to the path to victory, in Ukraine's destiny fulfilling itself through pere-mohty, doing more than our strength and imaginings would allow.

The last inhale was Canada, a good job in the IT industry, studying creative writing in the United States, literary residencies in the West, vacations with her family in Egypt, the safety of her son Andriy in Poland. Vika (short for Victoria) crosses the Polish-Ukrainian border on February 26th 2022. In the evening she reaches Lviv, where her mother, a history teacher, lives. As soon as the Kyiv region is liberated, she moves east. On the train to Kyiv, she meets three women writers, as well as activists from the Revolution of Dignity, human rights activists and the journalists Larisa Denysenko, Svetlana Povalayeva and Olena Stiazhkina.