THE FIRST SEPARATION

‘I DON’T KNOW WHY YOU DON’T NEED me anymore. I’ve been thinking about this all year. But we will still be a part of each other’s lives. I love you,’ my husband wrote to me on the last day of 2022.

You might think that his message was preceded by a quarrel, or a slow fading of feelings. But he actually sent it because, around this time last year, I packed my suitcase and left our marital home. I did not leave the marriage, but I did take our five-year-old daughter away from our home country of Ukraine, when the war that we had heard about from our grandfathers and read about in history books broke out right on our doorstep.

In Ukraine, under martial law, most men from 18 to 60 years old do not have the right to leave the country while this war is still raging. This has forced millions of families to be separated for an indeterminate period. Mothers have become the sole guardians of their children, taking them to countries where missiles do not explode in playgrounds and schoolchildren do not learn their times tables in bomb shelters.

We are one of those families. A month after the war began, my husband and I decided that it would be easier for both of us if our daughter moved to a safe place. He stayed in Ukraine; I ended up in England with our child. And so, at the age of 40, I began my first long-distance relationship – with my husband, no less, the man I’d lived with for 16 years and whom I’d never been apart from for more than two weeks.

I know that most Ukrainians who fled the war abroad had a plan to wait for a month or two and then return home, but I had no illusions that the terrible events would end so quickly. On one hand, it’s easier when you’re not looking at your phone every second, waiting for the message saying: ‘Come back home, it’s safe here!’ On the other, it is much harder to know that there is an indefinite parting ahead that could last any number of weeks, months or even years.

None of us knew how our family would hold up through a long-distance relationship and all its requisite video calls and text messages. In the first months, there was little communication. It was too hard for each of us in our new realities, and we could not be a source of support for each other. I was afraid to ask uncomfortable questions about our future because I knew we wouldn’t be able to find the answers.

My greatest pain has been the separation between my husband and our daughter. He was always by her side, and I know how much he loves her. As for the two of us, I would not call our relationship perfect. But who can claim perfection in love, even in times of peace? Without there being any significant quarrelling or scandals, we had drifted apart in recent years, losing that feeling of intimacy. The crack appeared after the birth of our daughter: it was difficult for my husband, who plunged into the euphoria of fatherhood, to understand my postpartum depression. But we stayed together, and even lockdowns during the pandemic did not separate us, unlike many other couples.

Now, it is through being apart that we’ve found a new closeness. Strangely enough, films have become the safety blanket in our relationship. They had always been something that united us. When my husband and I met in our twenties, I was an avid fan of arthouse films and he introduced me to the magic of 1990s Hollywood movies like Forrest Gump and As Good As It Gets, brilliant in their simplicity. In the first year of our relationship, at the end of the working day, we often bought giant pizzas and watched Friends on an air mattress in our rented apartment.

At the most difficult moment of my life, alone with a child in a hotel next to a motorway in rural England, I found Friends on Netflix and did not stop watching until I had seen all 10 seasons; they became my therapy. Through them, I rediscovered that feeling of closeness and joy I’d had meeting my husband all those years ago. I sent memes to him, recalling the episode where Ross was in leather trousers, and Phoebe taught Joey how to play the guitar. Little by little, remembering our favourite moments, we began to text and call each other more often. He found a place in the apartment – on the windowsill of our bedroom – where he got signal during the constant power outages, and we discussed the latest seasons of The Crown and The Umbrella Academy as we both watched them, together but apart.

He started reading books on the psychology of relationships and began retelling them to me, adding his own analysis: ‘Look, we did everything right here. And then we made a real mess of these things, but who knew…’ Separation seems to have given us the opportunity to see our relationship from the outside. We both feel trapped in our circumstances, or perhaps I should call it our new life?

Soon, it will be a year since we’ve seen each other. The distance between us is measured not only by kilometres and borders, but by the depth of the abyss between peaceful Britain and war-torn Ukraine. The messages we send only skim the surface. We joke, cheer each other up, talk about our daughter. The real fear comes when I see messages about missile strikes in the news feed, when I write to my husband but he does not reply. Then he answers me from the shelter: ‘Don’t worry, I’m fine. I love you.’

I live in the belief that we will see each other soon, but I do not know if there is even a drop of rationality to it or if it is just my mind’s defence mechanism.

‘Watch Palm Springs,’ I write. ‘What a good one – it’s a metaphor for love,’ he replies the next day. In my opinion, the rom-com about a couple stuck in an infinite time loop is a metaphor for our relationship today. ‘What if we get sick of each other?’ the heroine asks. ‘We’re already sick of each other. It’s the best,’ the hero answers.

We know each other right down to the very smallest detail. We got sick of each other, but the involuntary separation became our key to rapprochement. During the most challenging year of our lives, not only have we survived, but so has our relationship, having gone through an arc of changes, from a fading marriage to two lonely people who possibly make a good couple.

Natalia Pasichnyk is a former senior editor at ELLE Ukraine.

WHEN I TRY TO RECALL MY EARLIEST relationship, it always takes a few minutes – a brief and blurry montage of the three boys I’d kissed in high school. They were relationships only in a contractual sense; they’d asked and I’d said yes, but the connection between us was immaterial enough to seem random.

When I think of my first queer relationships, I shut my eyes and feel as if no time has passed. As if I am still dancing inside someone’s living room, spring air seeping in from the screened windows and an index finger hooking around my belt loop, pulling me in. As if I am still there, ready and yearning to fall in love.

In an essay from my collection How Far the Light Reaches, I wrote about my first queer breakup, and how it felt earthshattering and tectonic as a 21-year-old: the most important thing that had ever happened to me at the time and something I would never be able to move past. But what I left out was the wonderful thing that preceded it: a first queer infatuation. It wasn’t love but something just as powerful and perhaps even more precious, at least in the sense of its infrequency; a first happens just once.

Now, seven years later, I finally have some perspective. I’ve fallen in what I know to be real queer love, and fallen out of it, or felt it shift into something platonic. But when I think back to that first time, I still feel the same headrush, a tug to unzip my body and unspool my senses.

The attachment was so strong it seemed unreasonable, obsessive.

A first queer infatuation is also a projection – not of an idealised person but a future version of yourself. It extends beyond whoever you happened to date, no matter how wonderful or special or kind they may have been. A first queer infatuation opens you up to the possibility of living a queer life, which is to say it can radicalise you. It asks you to care for yourself by finding out what kind of love and sex you desire, and perhaps what body you want. And it asks you to care for others, meaning other queer people whose right to be safe and wholly themselves may be threatened in ways you do not experience. It asks you to commit to the active, lifelong process of unlearning the bigotry and bias that are hammered into so many of us. This was the hardest and most unexpectedly wonderful consequence of my kiss in that living room: a wholesale retooling of my politics and my community. Queerness gives us the capacity to imagine more: more desire, more sensation and more care for all of us.

Of course, a first queer relationship frequently doesn’t work out, which is often for the best. After that breakup, I felt gutted, ruined for love. I thought the elation of the relationship was tied to my ex, and I imagined I could only find that feeling again with that person. To cope, I did my best to remove them from my mind. I blocked them from social media, ignored their texts, disappeared from parties where I saw or even imagined their silhouette. Looking back now, I wonder if I longed to erase our memories together if it meant I could burrow back inside the ecstatic intensity of that initial desire, as if forgetting meant I could steal another first. I was dating once more, and everything and everyone seemed drab and diluted. But then I met someone who made me feel unzipped all over again, and I revelled in this new infatuation, familiar only in how it overcame me and became, suddenly, the most important thing in my life.

Now I realise you may never run out of firsts. I hope I never will. As a trans person, I am now dating another trans person for the first time. The firsts of this relationship have been manifold, not just with my partner but with my own body, and its relationship to theirs. Coming out is a process in the truest sense of the word. You come out as the same thing over and over and over again, and you may also come out as something new.

My first queer infatuation made me imagine a future radically different from my present reality and, in doing so, it taught me how to continue imagining all my wildest futures. I used to picture my life peaking early – meeting a man in college, marrying and dutifully having children, followed by decades of life that were, at best, hazy. I wanted to figure everything out early on so I’d never be late to anything. But that rush toward selfdefinition meant I didn’t give myself the time and space to ask my body what it wanted, to look in the mirror and ask myself if the reflection fitted. My first queer relationship taught me that the greatest highs of my life have followed my lowest points. It helped me realise I yearn for a life full of firsts, for myself and everybody, however they come, and I hope we greet these with openness, curiosity and care. I suppose I am chasing the feeling of imagining that everything is possible; that I am still meeting myself and still able to unlock new shapes of euphoria.

These days, when I feel overwhelmed by a different kind of ‘first’ – the terrifying firsts of climate change – I take comfort in dipping into the memories of my initial queer infatuation. I remind myself that everything is possible, there can always be more, and the most exciting way to imagine your future is to envisage it with others: my queer friends, lovers, ex-lovers and ex-boyfriends, too, their futures persisting alongside mine.

‘My Life In Sea Creatures’ by Sabrina Imbler is out now.

QUEERNESS GIVES US THE CAPACITY TO IMAGINE MORE: MORE DESIRE, MORE SENSATION, MORE CARE