There’s a lot to be said for the practical skills and experiences that I’ve gained here in Ukraine.  My resume’s proof enough of that; as are the resumes of my fellow volunteers, those extraordinary, brave, hopeful souls who have formed the very bones of my service here.  In these last days, though, I assure you, it’s not those nebulous skills (grant implementation, project management, communicative teaching) that are pulling at the very synapses of my brain to be drawn out.  I think, perhaps it’s those other skills, the ones that inevitably come with their own stories.   Living with a septuagenarian, harvesting walnuts, planting potatoes, toasting to communism, walking on ice, riding a bus standing, taking a bath squatting, sleeping on the kitchen floor, buying the right spice, sectioning a just-killed chicken.  Each of us have whole sacks of such stories that we use to hold ourselves up when we’re woozy and tired on our feet.  And when home feels just so far away.   Yet, even those don’t quite seem to get at just what it is Ukraine has been whispering about to me these past two years as I doze off.   What’s aching to be told is something stranger, with less of a beginning, less of an end. 

Would you believe that Ukraine taught me how to be sad? How to honor sadness, how to carry sadness and sit with it on your shoulder, how to sleep with it in your bed?   I heard her whisper it only in those few moments between wakefulness and sleep.  And oh, how I hated her for it.  Months went by and, because sadness was no kind bedfellow, I ached.  I dreamed of America and I could manage little more than a languishing sigh.  Then, something changed.  And like finally learning the proof to the Pythagorean theorem,  the squared a’s and b’s made sense and the picture became whole. 

I swear, it was just moments ago that Ukraine whispered to me again.  But this time, taking a moment to listen the whole way through, I learned of how – in the very molecules of sadness – I would find joy too. 

I came to Ukraine to understand sadness.

It might have been another country but then, of course, there would have been another thing to understand.

(I know, I know… It sounds like the beginning of some bad historical romance but, what’s a girl to do when the truth slaps her upside the head like a cold fish? So sue me, my departure is impending.)

Admittedly, I am a foreigner to sadness. Or at least, I was.  Sometimes it seems like the only reason I came to Ukraine was to cry a thousand tears and all the while to be in love.   Like I took up post here solely so that I could feel helpless as I watched people learn from me, not learn from me, so that I could learn from them, not learn from them.  It was all a wicked game, like picking paper-thin petals from a wild, red poppy.

In every other place I’ve known, I could run away from sadness – literally put on my sneakers and push open the stuck screen door, freeing myself of the morbid inefficiency of being unhappy.  Or better still, I could plan a trip away to a tall mountain or a far off lighthouse.  My best friend was adventure  incarnate and we were forever in search of the perfect recipe for fiddleheads and the right way to enjoy up all the moments there were to enjoy.  I abandoned my best friend because I needed to go and learn about sadness – a thing I just couldn’t do in Boston, or NY, or any place where I might be sure of myself.

In taking on the small pit of sadness, I found myself holding a different thing in each season.  It wasn’t immediate but eventually I started to see shades turning into a full, plump fruit.  And it wasn’t even loss, per se, that rattled me most days.  What I saw, what frightened me most, was how easily such melancholy could sit at your table when not a thing or human had been lost at all.

How simple it was to engage this melancholia, this veritable drug cocktail of desire and uncertainty.  How new and exciting it was to me.  If only for a moment, I was able to understand the way another person might see it – the coin’s backside, if you will.  I found things that I had expected to be simple were terribly obtuse and strange.  This notion ate at the corners of my day, crunching the minutes in on top of each other – the hours of real work hardly work at all.

The thing was, never having known sadness before left me with a backlog of unexpressed moments.  And I sat, face closed in on the just-emerging apple buds,  knowing that my education was far from complete.  And I languished in it. I learned that  sadness is not homogeneous and that it has as many sides as do the chirping larks ways to use my lost strands of hair.  And, in bits, I became less afraid.

I did really once believe that a person could live completely happily.  A quarter century cleared and hardly an incident besides those few betrayals of young love seemed proof enough.   But when you realize that your models are aging and that they will soon leave off this earth – it is inevitable that your confidence in happiness as answer and sadness as obsolete is shaken.

So, shaken, I knew right away that I couldn’t leave this place – no matter how much in love – until I figured out what to do about my mess of cards and confidences. Happiness was my least resistant path. Yet when there exists no resistance outside of yourself, the body creates its own.

And so, in spite of my very heart’s physiological refusal, I stayed.

I sat with myself a while and married all sorts of strange ideas and fantasies in my head.  I started a novel.  And I decided that I had arrived to Ukraine carrying two great burdens.  The first was a fear that the world might not live up to my own expectations of it. Over-hopeful, they call this.  Also, perhaps, unrefined.  And the second, an incessant need to live ahead of myself.  “After,” “next,” and “then,” whitewashing my world clean of any real color.

After I finish college, after traveling, after my first raise, after self-introspection, after… the ball is over.

In Ukraine,traveling through what seemed like the very depths of the earth and quite unbeknownst to me, after finally arrived.

And let me tell you, coming to the age of after is earth-shatteringly strange.

It is strange to realize that the age of  after is nothing more than this exact moment.  Stranger still, not to have known it before.   And it is strange to feel oneself without fear.  Indeed, I expected a stone heavy of burden and regret around my neck but here I am, instead, free.

And I know there is unknown – certainly.  But never until now did I think that after might actually be the good part.  That making a decision would not so much close doors as open them. That in living through something completely – a feeling, a moment, a year – I might find peace.

In late April,  I remember my desires to return home as, oftentimes, too much burden to take on.  But now, I see that what sadness I felt was joy.  What if, in returning from this place, I would find exactly what I wanted?  What if I were happy? What, then?

It’s a strange and frightening thing  – the happiness that moans out from the ashes of grief.  It can keep us perfectly still and staring at the currant bushes all afternoon long.  It can keep our thoughts buried among the burrs and walnut shells decomposing at the edge of a garden.

And is it a wrong thing that in my story it’s been such a slow, lumbering journey toward love? Is it wrong that I accept, in equal parts, my joy over the promise of closet space and my sadness to leave these few, small shelves?

I wouldn’t say that it is.

All’s so much quieter now. And I do want to leave it this way.  What is good and simple, untarnished.  Love for the pure, raw, incessant tug.

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