When I ask Olena where home is she tells me about the clouds in Luhansk. ‘They’re really beautiful, like mountains because there aren’t any tall buildings there. Home is where the sky has no missiles- just clouds and the sun and birds and planes- but not military, safe with passengers. The most important thing is the feeling that you can look at the sky without being scared. Because after 2022, I had to again learn how to look at the sky without fear.’

The first time Olena was displaced by conflict was in 2014, at the age of 19. She ‘got on a train to nowhere’ and wound up in Kyiv searching through old facebook friends for somewhere to stay. She rebuilt her life in Luhansk. She says ‘I loved that flat…The children’s bedroom had pastel wallpaper with balloons….my husband and I built a big balcony- and I pasted these stickers of pink peonies and all over it…we had a great life, we didn’t expect to have war… even more war. Then we started hearing explosions from the frontlines…then we saw the first missiles in the sky, interceptions- the children were terrified.’

When the invasion happened, Olena and her family fled to Vinnytsia. She says that now ‘I feel like I have two lives. Part of my soul is left there back in that life. So I’m here, but at the same time I'm there.’ When I ask her what she hopes for the future she says ‘ I don't see the future, for now. I live in the present day…I just think ‘I woke up in the morning, thanks God, I went to work; thanks God. My children went to school, God thank you.’ She has portraits of her children tattooed on her arms. She shows me her other tattoos too- a mandala, a daisy with a plaster, birds. She says ‘they’re all connected to the war…they’re like scars.’ I show her my tattoos, and some of my drawings. Olena likes drawing too. She shows me a photo of one of her paintings - a road leading to a little house on a hill covered with bright yellow wheat. The sky is dark blue, because, Olena says, ‘it’s stormy, like it’s about to rain.’ She points to the single lit window of the house- I added this to be like hope.’ I ask if this drawing is of a real place that she’s lived. But she says ‘no- an abstract place- a home in the heart.’