Finding Home, Again and Again

I wanted to count how many lilies I saw today – not how many sirens I’ve heard. I wanted to count the red cars passing – not tanks. February 24, 2022, was a Wednesday night – the night before my math test that I did not prepare for.

“Can I please take a day off tomorrow, Grandma?”

“Let's do it Friday instead, since tomorrow is your math test – you don’t want to miss it.”

I agreed. However, the real reason I asked wasn't the test – it was my gut feeling warning me that something life-changing was about to happen. Unfortunately...it did. I woke up to the most gut-wrenching sound I've ever heard – several bombs were dropped on my country, starting the war that is still happening to this day. The next morning, I checked my phone and saw hundreds of messages in our classroom group chat about what happened overnight, followed by 15 missed calls from my mother. My eyes started to water. Suddenly, I ripped my eyes off my phone – my babushka walked in.

“Alexa, the war has started. Everything will be fine, I promise. ” – she said in a calm voice. I called my mom back. Since my parents worked on the cruise ship in America, she picked up with a terrified voice – of course she was scared. Her daughter was in the country under attack. She and my dad were desperately trying to find a way to get us out.

I’d traveled before with my musician family all over Europe. However, this time it was a different kind of travel. No one knew what was going on in the country, and that made everything much more difficult to make sense of. Just a couple days earlier, when I was walking in the snowy park with my friend, I asked: “Do you really believe the rumors that Russia is going to invade Ukraine?”

“No way,” my friend said, shaking her head confidently.

“How could our ‘brothers’ ever attack us?” - that was the question everyone kept asking in schools, at home, online. But it did happen, and is still happening to this day, which leads me to wonder: what does “home” mean when home keeps changing?

I packed my life into a suitcase, in order to escape this nightmare I still didn’t fully understand. It didn't feel like packing clothes, more like packing pieces of myself, deciding which parts of my childhood I was allowed to bring and which parts would have to stay behind. I folded my favorite shirt with a unicorn that was a gift from my mother, grabbed my worn-out stuffed teddy bear – the only familiar thing I could still hold on to, and off we went. I stared back at the shelves still full of sketches, books, and memories. I kept thinking: How can all 12 years of my life fit into one tiny bag? And if they can...what does that say about home?

Leaving my apartment that night felt like stepping out of one version of myself and into another. The decision was so urgent that I left all of my friends and many relatives behind, without knowing if I will ever come back. My mom found tickets for a bus from Zhytomyr – my hometown – to Poland, the closest place we could feel safe in. When my grandma and I arrived at the bus stop, the atmosphere hit me in the face. It wasn't just depressing – it was suffocating. It felt like even the sky above us was filled with fear that no one could escape. People stood silently with the tiny bags they packed at the last minute. Children cried. Adults held their phones as if they were the last connection to normal life. Every face had the same type of expression: total confusion.

When we finally boarded the bus, it didn't feel like normal transportation – it felt like stepping into uncertainty, a portal into the unknown. We drove for hours, then stopped again and again – sometimes for air-raid sirens, sometimes just to make sure there wasn't shelling nearby. There was no internet, no way for me to tell my parents, "I am okay.” You never knew how long each stop would last.

Poland was the first place where I could inhale without fear, but instead of relief, I felt only emptiness. That was the day I realized I didn't just leave my home; I left the life that made sense to me. The first morning I woke up in a foreign country, it wasn't to sirens this time – but something much worse. I overheard my mom speaking quietly with my grandma Luda (the one who took me out of Ukraine) about my other grandma, Lena, who had stayed behind.

“Oh my god, is Lena okay?” Luda whispered. I grabbed my phone and checked the news. Last night, just after we crossed the border, a bomb was dropped on the school across from my house. My babushka Lena was there.

“I am okay. I’ll call later. The windows popped from the explosion, so I I need to clean up,” she texted. I exhaled. But what didn't make sense, and still doesn't to this day, is this: why must innocent people carry the weight of war they never asked for?

Safety didn't mean stability, so my mom encouraged us to move to Germany next. The kids in school spoke a language I couldn't understand. I felt like a flower seed thrown into a garden of vegetables and told, You’ll grow here now. Still, I managed to find connections. Surprisingly, the kids smiled at me, gestured, and tried to translate simple phrases into English.

“Do you want to sit with us?" It was awkward, yes, but sincere. And I realized: even in a foreign language, you can still find familiar intonations. But belonging, at least for us, was temporary.

We moved again, but this time to the Netherlands. We were placed in a Ukrainian shelter that was small, loud, emotional, but...it reminded me of home. Not because of the furniture, but because of the people who understood how you felt before you even said it. Still, we couldn't stay.

Later, we said “goodbye” once again. An American family agreed to host us in the U.S., settling in Pennsylvania. I flew across the ocean, leaving pieces of myself that I had lost count of. And here we go again- new school, new faces, new streets, new language for the third time. A nother home I had to build from scratch.

Three years passed in Pennsylvania. Then we moved to California because of my parents’ work. I thought that maybe this time it will be easier – but no. Every move felt like digging out my heart and searching for new pieces of myself that had gone missing. However, in California, I had a chance to build my own home. When I stood at the bus stop near my new school, I felt something I haven't felt in a long time – I heard the language I understood. And not only did I understand what the girls were saying, but they were speaking the language most dear to me – Ukrainian. I started to notice even more people who spoke Slavic languages. However, even

though the school has a lot of children who come from Slavic roots, it didn't look like a community. That's where my experience kicked in. I knew exactly how to solve this issue, as someone who also needed a community. I created the Slavic Club – a place for people who know what “losing home" feels like, a place where strangers become community, where everyone can find a piece of their culture to hold onto or celebrate.

And then I finally understood the answers to the question that tormented me from that evening, where I heard the first explosions. Home is not where you came from. It is something you carry with you and something you create for others – even when your own home keeps

changing again and again.