Take Your Photos (Before the War Comes)

In my mind, Bobbie and Deda were always that age. Their skin was paper thin, stretched over cheekbones and knuckles. I didn’t know where they came from. I didn't know they were once young like me. There were no pictures that proved it. Nothing that showed them in black and white, with a Bobbie and Deda of their own.

Their past was a foreign language. It was hard and soft, pushed out in staccato sounds shushed against their teeth. I remember certain looks they had, spotted only in flashes—each seeing something in me held deeper than I could know. Such a place dips into oblivion, silent and heavy, locked tightly under a chest of iron.

From both sides of Ukraine, enduring war and work camps and loss, they left and never returned. It was rarely spoken about, at least not to the grandchildren, but I can imagine that to survive said all worth telling. When you are the (remaining) one, you simply go on.

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There’s an edge to myself there, in a history and lineage increasingly distant with time, where the truth has no form. It’s lost, and that shadow can be maddening. Whose steps I walk in, where my son gets his round face—questions that prove I am just enough out of my own reach, fishing in ashes and sketching with the charcoal that I find.

In this, I am not alone. The ghosts are gathering at train stations and theater ruins. Sunflowers, with their heavy heads, are bowing to pray in the fields. What’s happening in Ukraine has been happening all over the world, but in them today I see my missing pieces from then. I hear the worry in cadence that was once my lullaby.

I want war to feel far from everyone. For us to lift the calloused brutality, discovering the vulnerable life that is the richest reward. I want us to hold our pictures close and remember, in vivid color, the arms of those who’d gladly wrap us up in theirs again.