Can we reschedule?

“Can we reschedule?”

Over the years of working with western colleagues, I had learned to accept that they don’t fully understand what war feels like from the inside. They would ask me to find someone in occupied Mariupol for an interview, or seem genuinely puzzled that I couldn’t just log on at a time that suited them. I made my peace with this long ago – they don’t have to understand. But this time, it was a Ukrainian who asked.

It was winter, the kind where every online meeting had to be carefully scheduled around power outage timetables – and sometimes around shelling timetables, as we had already begun to joke among ourselves in that dark way. The question about rescheduling the meeting came from a colleague who had left for Europe in 2022, and it hit me almost physically, precisely because she was the one to say it. That innocent query had no business feeling like an accusation – and yet it did. For a long time, I couldn’t understand why.

We knew that war would bring pain and rupture. But there are ruptures no one warned us about – ruptures that are quiet and slow, and for that reason the most devastating. One of them runs not between Ukraine and the world, but through Ukrainians ourselves – between those who left and those who stayed. Almost no one talks about it. But it’s there, and with every passing month it grows wider.

I would look at a friend’s social media post about a strike on Kyiv and realise that for them, the story began when it appeared in their feed. For me, it had begun much earlier – with the siren in the middle of the night, the explosions, the corridor where we had sat huddled with family, the silent wait to find out who hadn’t made it this time. And sometimes I would think: ”Oh, come on, what hypocrisy – to share a post about my city burning and then close the tab and go on with your lovely day.” I knew this was unfair. But the thought came anyway.

I understood something else the summer I managed to get away to another part of Europe and meet up with friends. We were sitting on a terrace in one of those beautiful cities where life looks orderly and safe, talking about work and plans. And then someone’s phone went off – the air raid alert – and within seconds everyone else’s followed. In Ukraine, everyone gets the sirens on their phones, but here, in this landscape, it sounded so wrong that we all fell silent, as if someone had cut the sound. Rita looked at her phone first and said: “Drones over Kyiv.”

A minute later came another alert – a MiG had taken off, cruise missiles launched, ballistic threat. I get these notifications every day, but in that moment I felt my heart drop, because in Kyiv there are family, people I love. Fear for them came over me suddenly and completely. And then I looked at my friends and saw on their faces exactly the same thing – like a mirror I hadn’t expected to find. The same fear, the same helplessness of someone who is far away and can do nothing. That was the first time I allowed myself the thought that maybe they were living through this war too – just differently. Through screens, through the helplessness of watching from afar and feeling they have no right even to their own fear. It occurred to me that perhaps neither group was misunderstanding the war. Those who left and those who stayed were simply no longer living in the same version of it.

I hear about their struggles – the bureaucracy, the loneliness, the uncertainty of being a refugee. And at the same time, I catch myself thinking: “God, how lucky you are. Not that your problems aren’t real, but they exist inside safety.” And underneath that, a quieter and uglier thought: “Do you think there is something I can do to help?” I never say any of this out loud. But the thoughts keep coming back, and with them the shame that they come at all.

A colleague – also Ukrainian, also among those who left the country after the full-scale invasion – was explaining why she hadn’t done her part of a joint project: depression. My first thought was ugly and I knew it: “Only I get to make excuses here. Are you really complaining about your depression while we are being shelled?” And then came the shame.

But I wasn’t prepared for what came next. “How long can people keep using the war to make the rest of us feel guilty?” my colleague asked.

The remark stayed with me, not because it offended me, but because it frightened me. I had long ago started to feel ashamed to mention too often the reality I was living in, worried it would sound like guilt-tripping, like competing to be the one suffering the most. Hearing it from her, from someone also Ukrainian, also inside all of this despite being in a safe country – it felt like a blow from one of our own.

When my mother comes back to Kyiv, I think: “You’re here, you’re in the same world as me.” And then: “I am happy that someone I love has travelled from safety into a city that gets bombed regularly. I’m self-centred.” And immediately: “God, I’m such an egoist.” Then she leaves again, and so do all the others who have managed to visit Ukraine. They head back to Kraków, Berlin, Vilnius. I look at photos from their spontaneous weekends, their last-minute concerts, and I don’t just envy them. I’m angry. Every trip I take is like a military operation: no flights out of Ukraine, hours to the border, permits, logistics. Why is it so easy for them? Why not for me? I know why. That’s what makes it worse.

Once we lived in different cities but in the same world. Now my mother is in Bulgaria, Dasha is in Poland, Ira is in Germany, Katya is in Austria. The map of closeness has shifted so quietly that I didn’t notice until it had already changed. I don’t miss life before the war – I miss the feeling that the people I love are living in the same reality as me. Maybe that’s why my thoughts are so full of “I” and “they” – and so short on “we”. Not because we stopped loving each other, or because anyone chose the wrong side of a border, but because war has a way of placing people inside different versions of the same story.

And perhaps that is why I am always waiting for the next meeting on a terrace. Not in Berlin or Warsaw or Vienna. Here.