I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
A
On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.
xA
November 1, 2026: Nina Chayka
X
[N]one of us are on vacation. Refugees aren’t tourists.
The air raid siren, again. I walk to the bathroom on autopilot. The tile floor turns my feet into ice. Every eight to ten hours they bomb, so I set up a makeshift nest inside the bathtub—blanket, pillows, and an iPad. The front door slams shut; Emil still obediently descends to the building’s basement every time…
After leaving Ukraine and Russia, the rest of the characters scattered to the US, to Barcelona, to Istanbul, to Batumi, and to Budapest. We hear from Nadia first—safe and thriving in Connecticut in 2022. Because of an abusive husband, she’d started preparing to leave six months before the war.
America possessed a certain sex appeal that Europe didn’t. Europe felt familiar. America was where you ran off to if you were ambitious or crazy.
x
The first thing that shocked me about America was the smell. Why does everything reek like a tire factory? Out the window at JFK I saw the materials of the city: iron, cement, glass reflecting more iron and cement. Absolute gray, unbroken by the murky sky.
When we hear from Nadia the second time, we go backwards in time to earlier in the year, as she is in the midst of her departure preparations. We also see her after she crosses the border in Kraków, where she runs into Lilia, whom we already know at this point in our reading. It is her grandfather who is too old to leave and her mother Elvira, who is an Olympic champion and a Parliament member, and too well known to be able to leave. Lilia is eighteen.
She wants us to separate. What kind of mother does that?
x
Since March…our class lost three students each week. Then teachers started to disappear too.
x
I fold my training gear and three pairs of Nikes into the duffel bag that I take to practice. What else do you bring when you’re fleeing the war?
A number of the characters land in Batumi. There, we meet Marat and his girlfriend Veronica. We also meet Rosa (Marat’s sister) and Pavel (Rosa’s boyfriend) .
From Marat,
It had only been a month… but we were all changed people…
Pavel chose Batumi because he “wanted somewhere cheap with good weather where I could play music.”
I see the endless night in February 2022, when life as we knew it came to an end.”
From Rosa,
Why do I carry this oversized backpack like a runaway teenager? The urgency to always be prepared for something horrific—but what?
x
The shame of Russianness can eat you whole. Particularly around Ukrainians, especially at a Ukrainian restaurant in a city of migrants… And we are not even ethnically Russian! We are Tatar!
x
I’ll show up at the airport, underslept from the sex daze and the creative fever, and give my brother a hug. He’s moving countries again, three suitcases and his quiet wife in tow, their child maybe already growing inside her. I won’t see them again, for a year, two years, three, or maybe never. We will go on living.
Another group lands in Istanbul. Nina (a childhood friend of Marat) and Elena and Diana, who I love because she says, “Home is where your bookshelves are.”
Of course the nod to Chekhov is intentional. There’s the title, an echo of Chekhov’s The Seagull. And the Russian writer is mentioned in the first story.
In this collection, seagulls—intelligent and adaptable—appear as dead gulls, gray gulls, fledgling seagulls, Spanish seagulls, hungry seagulls, and more. My favorite mention is “seagulls hovering above the Bosporus.” I kept envisioning a flock on the beach, a predator approaching, and the way they would scatter in all directions. It works.
All of us hover over the waves, suspended like large sea birds, waiting for the current to wash over us.
Fascinating stories, beautifully written, with a lovely return at the end. I was riveted.
Over time, writing down stories of people impacted by displacement, immigration struggles, and the intensely personal dramas of our lives—divorces, marriages, childbirth, falling in and out of love—unfolding against the backdrop of geopolitical crisis was a way for me to connect with those people, to find resonance between their stories and mine.
Nina holds a B.A. from Harvard and is currently living in Brooklyn.
Come back on NOVEMBER 1st to read how NINA CHAYKA spends her days.