Olga and I arranged to meet at a café in Paris, near the Bastille metro station, the same place where we had met so many times over the past four years. The décor had not changed. She had. Sitting here, I had seen her wracked with worry, angry, tears in her eyes or a smile on her lips. She sometimes came alone, sometimes with her son, who was almost two years old. Her hair had been short. On this February day, it was pulled back in a long ponytail streaked with silver. Time had passed. Far too much time spent talking about the war, the horrible din of which gripped her insides. The fighting was 2,000 kilometers away, but that was qhere her loved ones were, so her heart was there, too.

“It’s silly,” Olga said softly, “but when I wake up in the morning, I realize the war is still there, I can’t escape that thought. I feel like we’re trapped in this hopeless time. But it’s very difficult to make people who aren’t living it understand. Is it even possible to understand it without experiencing it?”

When, in the early days of the Russian invasion in February 2022, I suggested that each of them keep a war diary between France and Ukraine, none of us imagined they would still be recounting their daily lives 1,500 days later. Sasha in Kyiv, Olga in Paris, where she has been living since 2016. In these thousands of lines, they have not always written about the latest war news. Olga and Sasha also told us about the Ukrainian language, about poetry, about their childhood memories, their family history, their loves, the birth of their little boys, Zakary and Marian. As if to catch their breath between air raid alerts, lethal drones, sham negotiations, friends leaving for the front, and the heating and electricity that grew scarcer with each passing day – so many abnormal things that had become familiar.

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