Imagine you open a closet. Inside it there is everything you knew about Ukraine, Armenia, Turkey, Georgia or Russia before coming here.

What is it you have in this closet? In my case, there are old USSR wooden panels, smelling of dust and forgotten age.  They loom over Ukrainian flag, Georgian wine and  – look here, just a little bit below – here’s tiny Armenia, squeezed between hot and religious Turkish tractates and melancholic tsar-like rococo figurines and red communist posters of Russia. Our closets’ are filled with distinctively national or  international things, but you have not taken them out recently.

Did you picture it? Good, time to get rid of the dust. Take the countries out, make them talk and count to ten until they feel like students living in one dormitory. On day 3 of the IWC Write in Armenia 2018 Ukrainian team held a discussion with Georgian counterparts about our mutual history of USSR, struggles to open our small literatures to the world and all the things we share. We share only the sea, our languages aren’t similar, our females are fair-haired and their males dark-haired. We’ve spent 20+ years blaming the same people, we understand what it was like – to go to Moscow from Lviv to buy a super expensive pair of jeans. We can judge people by number of famous people with surname Shevchenko and share mayors who came from sport. We share a lot in common. Much more that I thought. Much more than my closeted view of the countries allowed to see.

I feel like I see Georgia a little better now. I hope I’ll be able to rediscover other countries as well.

P.S. And you can’t not acknowledge how gorgeous we look on this photo in the snow, right?