A Collection of Postcards I’ll Never Send

A Fragment of My Search History

Ukraine and Russia envoys meet for peace talks. Russia invades Ukraine live updates. Three dead as maternity hospital hit by Russian air strike. I wonder if these same articles are censored in your crook of the Desna River, for criticizing the government, for promoting lies from the West. You are far from the shells dropping through the clouds like snow, from martial law and curfews wrapping Kyiv in a shroud. There are eight time zones and nearly 5,000 miles between us, so I don’t know if Bryansk is safe. If birds hop along your window ledge, if children stampede down the streets in a game of Cossacks and Robbers, if neighbors swap both recipes and laughter between opened windows. But the curve of the Earth has hidden you from me. I pray that you aren’t watching tanks crawl down the street like ants, lumbering through your city in screeches of metal and the stink of smoke. But maybe your world is still quiet. Nestled in the elbow of a river, in the basin that holds your city in its cupped palms, maybe the only break in the silence is the birds hopping along your windowsill, singing you to sleep.

A Still Life of a South Dakota Wildfire

The grass doesn’t burn, only smolders. Blackens like a bruise across the prairie, chokes the air with smoke. When I found tiny pockets of internet through towns squatting on the Wyoming plains, I translated stories into Russian about bundles of prayer cloth knotted to the lowest limbs of crooked aspen, bighorn sheep snuffling the dirt, sun-baked stone painting the horizon with jagged slices of amber. But I am telling you this now in hopes that you will tell me about your wildfires, too. The war may not be in Russia, but pain does not obey international boundaries. So when I ask you about wandering the halls of the Hermitage or the “herring under a fur coat” you devour every Christmas, know that I am really asking if you are okay, if your world is still spinning or if it’s been knocked off-kilter by bombings and machine gun fire. I am not asking for the truth, not exactly -- the written word, even a text, carries a danger for you that it never will for me. So if you cannot tell me about the fires, tell me about the ashes. The embers smoldering at your feet. The smoke.

A Scene from my Bedroom Three Summers Ago

Your first letter took three months and two Kremlin postage stamps to reach me. Despite never knowing whether you have dimples or chewed fingernails or freckles on your nose, I fell in love with your words, your earnest apology for your broken English, the butterfly earrings stabbing through the envelope that made it through customs by dumb luck or a miracle. I wished you were there beside me, cross-legged on my bedroom floor and laughing at my clunky attempts at Russian. I wished you were there to tell me about blinis and Масленица, to smile at the matching posters of Starry Night tacked onto our walls, to share our love of the languages that we will never share. But there is more than an Atlantic-sized distance between us. It is the difference between a foot and a meter, “hello” and “привет.” A war on CNN and a war on your doorstep. In that moment, though, years before this startling reminder of everything your country is capable of, I did not see that distance. Only the closeness of a translation, the joy of saying “yes, I understand you.”