Daybreak

Daybreak is what was, what is, and what will always be. It came yesterday, it came today, and it will certainly come tomorrow. You can watch it every single day and it still astonishes you, still delights you, as if for the first time. You can never grow tired of a sunrise — today's doesn't look like the ones that came before, and it won't look like the ones still to come. You can't say, "Oh, I've seen your sunrise already," because you haven't seen the one coming tomorrow. Not yet.

Every morning a huge red-gold disc peers out over the horizon and climbs higher into the sky. Warm colors slide into one another — shades of red, pink, gold. Daybreak happens to everyone — where the horizon meets the sea, on a mountaintop, outside your bedroom window. It belongs to everyone, and at the same time, it belongs only to you.

And oh, that sky — so much happens in it! Soft white clouds drift by, and if you're in no hurry, you can watch the wind build whole pictures out of them. Then suddenly grey clouds roll in, rain, and out of nowhere gold lightning splits the darkened sky. For an instant the clouds flare gold from the inside, and, covering your ears, you wait — five, four, three, two, one — for the thunder to crash. It rolls in waves, further away each time, and the tense waiting gives way to the pleasure of the show.

Every day the Earth dances on its axis, and night falls without your noticing. Stars light up one by one against the darkening sky. The moon comes out from behind the clouds. Sometimes bright and orange, like an orange; sometimes pale yellow, like a slice of apple. A path of moonlight glints on the water and sways on the waves. You want to reach out your hands, scoop up the water, and it feels like they'd come away silver.

And every morning, without fail, daybreak comes, piercing the horizon, sweeping the dark away. It doesn't ask whether you're ready. It just comes — steady, powerful, unconditional. Like a sign that a new chapter has already begun.

Somewhere Between Smoothies and a Butterfly

The month flew by fast. We were shamelessly happy, and every morning was magical, every day enchanted, the sea refreshing, the fruit tropical, the massages restorative.

Every day there were suddenly very important things to do, and we happily sank into them. Go to yoga, find a decent self-service laundromat, buy groceries, an evening stroll by the sea, sunset on the beach, scout out new beaches nearby, get to know the neighbors, breakfast with a bird's-eye view, and good lobster at the fish market. This mattered — a lot. Letting yourself relax, not rushing, handling small everyday tasks. Not counting the time spent watching a butterfly, a squirrel, or a monitor lizard as time wasted. Not hurrying. Not running anywhere, not hearing the words:

"We're late!"

"You have to!"

"Get something done!"

It was strange, because just a few weeks earlier, entirely different things had mattered to us — more serious things, somehow: parent-teacher conferences, exam prep, reports, inspections, work, self-improvement, education, productivity. Watching butterflies was definitely not on that list.

Still, it was exactly then that the realization came: a person sets her own priorities. Not consciously, at first — more like it was forced on me. Having torn myself out of my old reality, I sank into solving simple but urgent problems — because they genuinely needed solving. As my husband likes to say:

"When you find yourself somewhere unfamiliar, the first thing you need is a roof over your head, so the wild animals don't eat you. Then water — without it you'll keel over. Food comes last — you can go a solid thirty days without it. Lose some weight in the process, too."

But once we'd dealt with the basics, we got an unexpected bonus we hadn't even dreamed of: the chance to slow down, to think, and even to talk to each other. I mention that deliberately. My husband and I love each other, even after all these years, but it was only in Thailand that I realized we never actually talked. Not about logistics, of course — about anything personal. What was his dream, how did he see our future, what lit him up — his ikigai. And in the course of those conversations, it turned out I had no idea what I wanted, either. What I wanted to do, where I wanted to be, what I pictured our life looking like. And what, exactly, was my ikigai?

Because the reality we'd lived in before had held us tight and never left room to think about living differently. Or rather — you could think about it all you liked, but it had to stay an impossible dream. The kind you'd chase your whole life while a thousand thin threads held you back from ever reaching it, manufacturing the illusion that it couldn't be done, feeding you more and more "important" tasks and clever justifications to burn your life on instead, filing the dream away for someday.

The film Up showed me, in the sharpest possible way, the illusion behind our assumption that life goes on forever. We put off the things that actually matter, replacing them with a parade of tasks we've talked ourselves into believing are urgent. For me, that film ends right at the beginning, where that funny, sweet girl, who dreamed as a child of travel and adventure, grows up and never manages to break free of the invented obligations pressing in on her, never gets to fulfill her simple dream. I sob every single time, right at the moment she's gone. I ache for her. For him. For their dream! Because she wasn't just postponing her dream — she was postponing her life. Do you understand? Her own life!

And that's when I started writing posts online. I didn't know what my dream was, didn't think it would ever turn into a book — I just started expressing myself. I needed some outlet for the wonder I felt at everything around me. That butterflies fly. That I could walk straight outside in my pajamas and watch a squirrel, drink coffee, look at the sea, swim in it for four hours, eat mango and pineapple-passionfruit smoothies. I didn't understand who else I could share it with, or why I even needed to. But the urge was there, and I wrote. It was strange — a one-way conversation — but I didn't dwell on it. There was a need, and I let it out. You can't smother the urge to create — it's always in service of something bigger. Or at the very least, a step toward whatever comes next.

And that's exactly what happened. From the moment I started writing those posts, my book began. Material started to appear, some of which made it into the first book, and now even into this one. If it weren't for my husband, there might not be any books at all. I'd probably still just be writing on social media, never daring anything more. He was the first one to say:

"Write a book. You can do it."

And he became my first reader. Though, honestly, he makes a pretty poor editor — he'll love anything I write. And, truth be told, that matters more to me than any correction ever could. Editing isn't hard. Only he can inspire.

Two weeks after we moved into the little house, we had to decide what came next. We weren't so shameless as to ignore the question of housing, or how we'd handle our status if we decided to stay. We hadn't found anywhere — everything was booked through February, the decent places through April. Still, Ivan and I agreed, without either of us needing convincing, that our hearts just weren't in staying in Thailand long-term. We wanted a sign, some kind of confirmation, that this was the place to drop anchor.

Besides, we hadn't flown off just to settle wherever we happened to land. We wanted to travel, to see new places, to find where we'd actually feel at home. The vacation had turned out exactly right — we'd relaxed, hit the maximum program on beach, tan, foot massages, and mango smoothies.

After some thought, we decided to keep moving through Asia and map out a route for the next few months, so we wouldn't just drift around in a fog of indecision. The criteria were simple: places we hadn't been, a coastline, and a visa of at least thirty days for Russian citizens.

Eyeballing the map — "two fingers left of wherever" — Ivan suggested Malaysia first: the island of Langkawi. Free visa, a beautiful coast, and we'd never been. I found a little house in a Malaysian village right away — two bedrooms, a kitchen, a washing machine. Though Ivan had some disappointing news: the house wasn't on the coast, it was in the middle of the island. That didn't bother me much — we were planning to rent a car anyway.

After Malaysia we picked Vietnam, the island of Phu Quoc. We'd already been to Nha Trang, and we wanted something new. Reviews called Phu Quoc a slice of paradise, and paradise was exactly what we were after.

After Phu Quoc the choice fell on Bali, somewhere we'd never been either. We didn't have any particular expectations — we just set it as a placeholder on the calendar. What would come after that, we didn't plan out: we still had two months, two countries, and a couple of paradise islands ahead of us. No point getting ahead of ourselves.

Just picture it! A mere four weeks earlier I'd been handing off responsibilities at the factory with a dead-serious face, drafting instructions for the staff, running numbers, building productivity charts, holding meetings, answering a million calls and messages a day, ironing my kids' school shirts — and I couldn't quite believe there would ever come a day when none of it would matter to me, none of it would be mine anymore.

And now my husband and I are sitting on the terrace with a drink, having gotten back from the beach a couple of hours ago, mango sliced on the table, longans and mangosteens washed and ready, an aroma diffuser lit and filling the air with the sweet, resinous scent of Thai incense. The kids are in the living room, glued to a video game. And we're making plans for the coming months, which countries we want to live in, tracing our fingers over the map, gauging the distances, and I'm already pulling up flights or ferry tickets, houses, villas, apartments.

It was strange, and thrilling at the same time — building a different reality. It turned out that even creating a life full of adventure takes real effort. Thinking differently, not waiting to be told what to do, letting yourself want whatever comes to mind!

"Let's fly here! Look how close it is on the map! Fifty-five minutes by plane!"

New Year's was coming, and the plan had been to ring it in at the Malaysian village on Langkawi. But a village is a village, Malaysian or not. Sun, sea, family time, and New Year's movies — that's all wonderful, but I wanted to cut loose. To grab life with both hands! And fifty-five minutes by plane wasn't far at all from the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. The name itself was tempting, that strange run of syllables, exotic the way all of Asia felt exotic. "Why not!" we said, and bought tickets on the spot to spend New Year's there.

It's easy to plan a trip and book a place to stay, as long as you have money. We had money. For now.

We had some small savings, Ivan's car had sold, and the factory was still paying out dividends in those early days. But savings have a way of running out. And without me personally running it, the factory wouldn't last long — I was well aware of that. But I didn't want to go back to it, and I couldn't have even if I'd wanted to. Quite the paradox. So I simply stopped thinking about it, as long as it kept coughing up some money on autopilot.

More and more, I found myself thinking of Scarlett O'Hara and her saving grace:

"I'll think about that tomorrow."

My gut deliberately blocked out everything we'd left behind in Russia — the factory and its staff, our house, my car sitting in the yard. Ivan and I never absolved ourselves of responsibility for any of it, and we took care of it all — before we left, and later, a year on, when the time came and we were ready for it. I was the one who took the longest to let go of the past. I needed to put a period at the end of that sentence, and I needed time to get there.

But for now, three weeks into our journey, we sketched out a plan and hurried on — chasing the pleasure of being alive.

Every morning starts at 6:30 without an alarm. You don't sleep in here, and every day you want to start as early as possible. Everything beyond the walls of your room insists you leave the cool of the air conditioning and step outside — birds chirping, a friendly sun, a hunger for experience.

Then again, the moment you open the doors, you realize air conditioning in the tropics is the single greatest invention of humankind. But that doesn't stop you. How could you possibly sleep when the calendar says mid-November and outside it's blazing hot, bright summer sun pouring down, coconut palms swaying, and huge, brightly colored butterflies playing around as if inviting you to taste the day!

Almost every morning my Ivan laces up his sneakers, pulls on his swim shorts, and goes for a run. This morning is no exception.

"I'm off!"

"Good luck!"

I heard the glass door creak shut and pulled the snow-white blanket a little higher, nearly burrowing into it. I wasn't fully awake yet, but I also knew I wasn't falling back asleep.

Well, I thought, he's gone and left me here alone.

A couple of minutes passed, the door creaked again, and there stood my glowing husband in the bedroom doorway.

"I was thinking — do you want to go to the sea?"

Of course I wanted to go to the sea!

Seven in the morning, the kids still asleep, most of the neighborhood still asleep, only the birds chirping and the newborn sun warming everything gently. Neither of us wants to wake anyone, wants this morning to belong only to us, so we talk in whispers and move around on tiptoe.

In a second and a half I've got my swimsuit on, a tunic thrown over it, and we're already flying along on the motorcycle. The wind whips through my hair, I hold tight to my man, and the morning already feels like an adventure!

It's the kind of Thai village where all the life and motion happens around the little lake just before the beach. That lake has a whole world of its own around it: an outdoor gym, a hair salon that's actually free, if you can believe it, just a box on your way out marked For Tips; locals and tourists out for a run, people walking their dogs, dogs walking themselves, young mothers pushing strollers hurrying toward the sea, motorbikes darting every which way, Thais rushing to work and other Thais rushing to relax.

At the turn from the village toward the lake, I mumble something about coffee, and Ivan pulls over at the first open café we see, where a Thai boy is already up, wiping down the tables.

"Could I have a coffee to go?"

"Sure! What would you like?"

Ten minutes later, two big cups of hot cappuccino in hand, we hop back on the bike and race past the lake, past the dog-walkers and the dogs walking themselves, toward the sea!

The water's calm today. We drink our coffee sitting right on the sand, then we're ready to wade into the endless turquoise-green water. It's so clear! Warm and cool all at once.

"Let's swim out to the buoys!"

Twenty minutes out to the buoys and back, unhurried, taking in the coastline, savoring every minute — we're too content to even talk much.

Swimming back to shore, we see happy dogs galloping along the sand after their owners, or after each other. We're not the only swimmers anymore; more people are drifting in, ready to sink into the welcoming, clean morning sea.

I inspect our things, stacked on our Crocs, with a suspicious eye, checking for any joyful morning damage from the mutts racing around us, ears flying, tongues out. Everything's fine.

"I need a photo of this morning."

And the bike races up the switchback road toward the wind turbine at the local lookout point. A few obligatory photos get taken, ones I'll never actually post anywhere, but in the moment, taking them feels absolutely essential.

Then I point a finger at the café by the lake, and two croissants with poached egg, salmon, avocado, ricotta, and a blueberry tea with honey close out this morning.

Everyone around us is smiling, and it feels like everyone knows everyone else.

It was magic. The magic of one morning.

A tale of how a girl stops being a girl. And becomes God-knows-what instead: a workhorse, a ballsy broad, an Iron Lady, a commander in a skirt, and so on down the line. So when, exactly, does that happen?

It's perfectly obvious: it happens the moment a girl starts doing the things that blow the fairy dust right off her, and picks up — and this is entirely my own interpretation, no claims to universal truth — picks up: the reins, the carrot and the stick, the day planner, the shovel, the light bulb, the stepladder, the frying pan, the mop. Every girl, at some point, finds something in her hands that slowly, steadily blows the fairy dust away.

Instructions for getting the girl back: Drop all of it, immediately! Even a little at a time, but start dropping it. The magic disappears. Do you understand? It disappears.

To get the fairy dust back, you have to let go of the reins, set down the mop, put the stepladder well out of reach, and throw out the day planner. Let's cast a little spell, shall we.

"Expecto Patronum! Let the light inside come back. The one with the sparkle in it."

Hold on not to control, but to the man you love, the one driving you toward a life where you can dream again. And there you are, flying along the switchback on the back of the bike, hair streaming behind you, arms wrapped tight around your prince, with absolutely no idea where he's taking you. But it's clearly somewhere out of a fairy tale.

What else? Oh, put that frying pan away already!

"Wingardium Leviosa! A breakfast menu with a sea view, up at bird's-eye height. Where the coffee's hot, the wind's in your hair, and there's not a single obligation on the plate."

What else? Trade the day planner for a Diary. Yes, I still write down plans, but mine are the girly kind — mine's pink, with a unicorn on it.

"Alohomora! A pink Diary and a little bit of common sense!"

What else? Oh, right! Put the mop back too. And go hang this on the door, the other side out: Please Clean the Room, which, translated, means — clean up everything except the dreaming and the tenderness.

But spells are tricky things, and the moment you pick back up whatever it was that blew the fairy dust off you, it all comes creeping back, slowly, silently, invisibly, exactly the way it was. We all remember how this goes. The carriage turns back into a pumpkin, the gown into rags, the glass slippers into old boots.

And sure enough! Like flipping a switch: the Diary turned back into a day planner, the menu turned into a frying pan — and an unwashed one, at that. Wait. That's not a plumber fixing the shower. That's a plunger, in my own two hands.

"Stop! Nooo!!! I don't want the plunger!"

I woke up and sat up in bed. Beside me my sun-tanned prince was still asleep, the snow-white sheets changed just yesterday, thank you, cleaning service, the motorcycle pawing at the ground somewhere outside, the day planner forgotten (deliberately) in some far-off kingdom. I'll go take a shower, and then my prince and I are off to see some elephants. And have breakfast at that café with the sea view, up at bird's-eye height.

Thank God I'm a princess. The things you dream up.

It's hard to believe, but in my experience, one of the most common struggles is losing touch with your own desires. Myself included. Not because they're gone, but because we forget them, putting them off again and again for later. It sounds absurd, but if you asked yourself right now: what do I want? — not many people could answer right away. And honestly, plenty wouldn't answer at all.

And here's an important caveat (yes, you'll have to think a little harder now): what do you want? This doesn't count:

"I want my kid to go to music school, play hockey, become a doctor, a lawyer, or a programmer."

That's not about you. That's a set of someone else's expectations. Do you have desires that you fulfill for yourself, ones that then give rise to new ones? Say, as a kid, you dreamed of drinking all the fizzy water you wanted from a soda machine. So eventually, you bought a Soviet soda machine, fixed it up, put it in your apartment, pulled out a proper faceted glass, and now you drink as much soda water as you like.

The most ordinary desires. The ones that seem unimportant. The ones that might strike other people as silly, simple, or absurd. But they're your desires. Climb Kilimanjaro. Fly to Vegas and get married. Rent a big white princess dress for your twentieth wedding anniversary. Put up a real fir tree for New Year's. Learn to play poker. Learn to dance the tango. Get a snake or a lizard.

Give it at least five minutes of thought. Don't rush. You're not late for anything. Remember what you wanted so badly as a child and never got, never bought, forgot about completely. It matters. You remember it. You've just stopped letting yourself think about it for a long time. It feels like an indulgence, a triviality — you're a grown-up now, after all.

You grew up, and your own desires got pushed to the very back. Far, far back. First in line came the wishes of your partner, your children, your parents, your friends, your teachers, your neighbors — the list goes on forever. And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing, you found yourself owing everyone: you had to show up, had to pay, had to help, had to cook. Had to, had to, had to.

And yet maybe what you'd actually wanted was to paint, or to sing in a church choir, to volunteer or become a vet, to hitchhike across a country or publish a slim volume of poetry.

But other people's opinions pushed those desires to the back burner. Calculation, cold reason, and a long list of arguments against took the front seat instead. The most interesting part is that we sign up for this game ourselves. And then, without even realizing it, we pass it on — to the people around us, to our children, repeating the exact same patterns that once turned our own lives down a different road.

Now's exactly the time to stop and start with yourself. To remember that I'd wanted a tattoo for thirty years. Or that someone else wanted to carve a little boat out of bark, with a sail, and set it loose in spring when the streams start running. Or maybe someone just wanted to sing, and finally make it to karaoke one day. Remember everything.

Everyone has something to remember. And something to want. Especially when life feels like it's going in circles, like nothing can ever change. That's probably exactly when it's time to remember what you actually want, and just take the first step. And yes — that really will make you happier.

Thirty-seven days since the Apocalypse. Thirty-seven days of slowly sinking into myself, into my own thoughts and desires, scraping myself back out of the puddle I'd melted into, flattened down into some barely recognizable shape by other people's expectations. What matters when Armageddon is close at hand? Acceptance. Because it's your one shot at rebirth afterward. To finally do what you've wanted to do for a long time, and not the way people expect you to. And, at last, to see what comes of it.

On one shoulder sits the accumulated wisdom of your ancestors, your own experience, all your hardened habits — everything people like to call maturity. And it's always easier to walk the well-worn path. On the other shoulder sits your childhood: the curious, restless little explorer who finds sameness unbearably boring. I wouldn't want to tip too far either way.

In our case, it was hard to squeeze even a little recklessness and nerve into all that rational, experienced, hyper-responsible thinking. To not do things the way we normally would, but to dream as big as we possibly could, to let ourselves plan absolutely anything we wanted, to think in bigger terms.

Our vacation in Thailand came to an end, and we thoroughly enjoyed the days we had left. We booked an island tour, drove out to the IKEA, which turned out to be tiny but still delighted us with its familiar goods, and wandered a shopping mall, having missed civilization a little. We said a grateful goodbye to Phuket at the pier and left without a single regret. Ahead of us lay Malaysia, Vietnam, Bali, and we couldn't wait for whatever came next.

We got to Langkawi not by plane but by speedboat. These are simple little motorboats, room for about fifty people, not even a bathroom on board. As far as I recall, this was exactly the kind of thing our whole trip was training us for: wake up the kid inside you, let your mind fly free. We had to make it to another Thai island, Koh Lipe, with one short stop along the way, and spend the night there. We set out to sea on a boat that turned out, we later learned, not to be in the best repair. We found this out at the stopover, which ran long thanks to the mechanical issue. We didn't waste the time — we had a delicious crab lunch, then wandered off to explore the island. Along the way we kept running into other passengers from our own "liner," who, like us, had decided a walk beat sitting around doing nothing.

The island turned out to be tiny, and within thirty minutes we'd walked straight across it and come out on the other shore. Evening was falling, locals and tourists were drifting toward the water. Hostesses from the beachfront cafés called out invitations to dinner; we waved them off politely and, in high spirits, enjoyed a golden sunset entirely on our own.

Our vessel got fixed somehow — probably, though we weren't really in the loop. By dusk we loaded up again and finally set off for Koh Lipe. How we made it there in the dark, with no landmarks, alongside our fellow passengers, poor souls, who spent the whole crossing fighting seasickness — only God knows. It was, without question, an adventure! Just not one we'd care to repeat.

At least the little house by the sea had been booked in advance. But our relief didn't last long, since the house turned out not to be by the sea at all, and looked more like a hut on chicken legs. It stood entirely off the ground, with a metal staircase leading up to the front door. On closer inspection, we found a shortage of usable space, a handful of thoroughly exhausted furniture, towels of questionable cleanliness, and a whole population of unpleasant tropical cockroaches and some relatives of centipedes, all of which scattered the instant we turned on the light.

A canopy bed with mosquito netting around it, and the knowledge that we'd only be here one night, gave us a faint hope of a decent night's sleep, but that's not how it went for me. I woke up every hour, convinced the insects were determined to sleep right there with us and were working their way in through the tiny gaps in the netting. The whole night passed in a tense standoff against the small-scale invasion.

We woke at dawn. Somehow the start of a new day is always calming, always encouraging. As it turned out, in fact, nothing had attacked us in the night — cockroaches and centipedes, like any other creature, aren't exactly hoping for a sudden death. The kids were still sound asleep in the hut next door; I gave their room one stern once-over for invaders and tucked the mosquito net in properly. I didn't feel the least bit tired from the lack of sleep — I just wanted to get myself out of that unpleasant place as fast as possible. Ivan and I packed our suitcases, left them to wait until checkout, and went for a walk around the area.

It turned out we'd been cheerfully placed in the huts furthest from the sea. And fair enough — who needs the sea in the middle of the night! Even though we'd specifically requested it when we booked, hoping to wake up to a sea view. We did eventually find the huts that actually had one, while we were out looking for somewhere to have breakfast. There were still a few hours before the ferry to Langkawi, so we had a leisurely breakfast with that very sea view, and sat out a tropical downpour there too. Our mood improved considerably.

At the appointed hour, with undisguised relief, I left that memorable place behind, and we boarded the ferry. It was an actual ferry, which reassured us — after yesterday, the last thing we wanted was another flimsy little boat like that one. Because of its size, the ferry couldn't pull up to the shore itself, so we and our suitcases were first loaded onto a motorboat. It wasn't nearly as frightening as the day before — broad daylight, we could all swim, and screw the suitcases if it came to that, plus the ferry was already waiting just offshore.

Every passenger filmed the moment our suitcases got tossed onto the ferry, since the whole thing played out like its own little sideshow, somewhere between "Whoops! Didn't quite make it!" and "Well, would you look at that, this one made it." Our suitcases got lucky — all five of them barely survived the landing and ended up stacked neatly at the entrance to the cabin.

An hour and a half flew by, and at sunset we pulled up to the Malaysian shore, somewhere we'd never once set foot before.