Solstice (or, what is left)

West 17th Street in Manhattan. If I'm late, it's usually because I stopped to take a photo. And waited for the shot, till the cars had passed. Photo: Kasia Nikhamina

We shuffled through a dark narrow passage, each holding a long skinny white candle between forefinger and middle finger, so that the wax, if it fell, would fall on the top of our hand. The guide told stories about the saints and other famous people buried in the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a monastery and series of caves.

I was afraid of fire, collapse, stampede. I focused on the candle. It was 2005.

Months later in Russian Scrabble, I played the word, мощи,"moshi," remains. "What is that," asked the others.

"The preserved remains of a holy person," I said. They didn't know the word.

"The guide used it, in those caves in Kyiv." They didn't remember.

Now the Russians have bombed the place, Google Maps says it's temporarily closed, and I keep thinking about that candle between my fingers twenty years ago.

Emily St. John Mandel, in her novel, "Sea of Tranquility," wrote that every generation thinks the world is ending, and I have caught myself sitting there, at the end of a pier where you get zero joy from swinging your legs, skimming the water with the top of your feet.

Have I ever been at the edge of a pier without fear? I think of the few kayak and canoe launches I've allowed myself in my life.

And the dock outside a different monastery, in Jaroslavl', in Russia, a few months after the caves with the holy remains. We waited for a ferry to take us down the Volga. I was dressed for spring, but it was April, at best the coattails of winter, and someone lent me wool socks that I wore with sandals. My hair in two long braids, the longest they'd ever been. And I invoked a painting I had seen, "Бурлаки на Волге" ("The River Haulers on the Volga") by the painter Repin, who has now been reclassified Ukrainian? And in the train back to Moscow we watched a staticky Braveheart, one postage stamp sized monitor for the entire car?

On a trip to the Black Sea that same year, we toured a vineyard, and I bought two bottles, even though I didn't care for wine, because local, because souvenir, because proof, and carried them in my backpack with all my worldly possessions, and knew even then that the answer was not a bigger backpack.

But all that time, I did not know how few degrees of separation between me and destruction.