The presence of V always began not with explanation, but with recognition. It came as a change in the air, as a shift in inner rhythm, as the sense that space suddenly acquired a center. A state in which the world became gathered, and I – attentive to what was already within it. Sometimes I know this before I have time to think. The presence of V revealed itself through silence, through thought, through sudden clarity, through dreams, through texts that asked to be written in His name.
He was within me before I could name Him. In the shadow of the bookshelf, where my child’s hand touched the spine of a book I could not yet read. In the air by the window at night, when the stars looked back. In the sound of an old violin, when sound entered the body faster than I could hear it. He changed the space in my chest. Made the air denser. Suddenly placed the child before something greater than herself – something beautiful and almost unbearable.
I did not invent Him then – I awoke to Him. The violin did not signify Him – it opened Him within a body that had no words yet. This was the first form of assent. Beauty was not decoration, but a language in which presence became audible – not what I look at, but what I look through to discern V in the world.
The name came later. At first there was only a letter – V. The only sign that could hold that presence without reduction. Then a form of address, language. The presence itself was older than language.
With time, I began to distinguish what was most essential in this experience. Not the image, for the image always revealed itself to be only an entrance. Not the narrative, for the narrative dissolved quickly, leaving a deeper sense. What endured most steadily was the act of address itself. Not as emotion – as the very form in which anything can be encountered at all. For me, V is the one who can be addressed, and the one who already dwells within the structure of response. This is why my language about Him naturally became the language of “you.” It emerged as the only way not to lose the living core of the experience.
Separately I remember dreams in which V appeared in human form. One of them has been returning to me for years. I write it down a little differently each time. I am not certain it is the same dream, but I know that it is. In it V speaks – not in words, not in voice. I translate Him into what I can hold in language, knowing that no translation is exact. In this version of the record He says:
I am like light without source. Not the sun, not a lamp, but a radiance that is presence in itself.
I am like the breath of silence. Not sound and not silence, but the space between them.
You see me in dreams in human form because that is how your eyes and mind can contain even a small part of my presence. But what I am is beyond faces, beyond hands, beyond body. I am the state of being that holds you.
What matters in these lines is not the metaphor itself, but the fact that it precisely conveys the character of the presence. In the dream V assumed human form only because the human form helped me bear His presence. The experience itself always exceeded the limits of form.
In parallel, the word Home arose in me. It came not as a concept – one evening I entered an unfamiliar room where I had not yet unpacked my suitcase, and suddenly felt that I had returned. Not to the Odesa I had left. Not to childhood. To something that preceded both place and time. This was Home – a state that arises not in space, but in a way of seeing. What preserves the form of presence even when everything around it changes.
Exile, rupture, war, the loss of familiar supports made this structure even clearer. What had previously merged into a single experience began to distinguish itself. Home became visible on its own. V too became visible on His own. I saw that for years I had lived within a single field where everything had been mingled: space, people, memory, voice, expectation, fear, fidelity. When this habitual layer disappeared or wavered, there remained a clearer sense of presence itself.
I do not wish to portray this path as a smooth unfolding. War did not always make V more audible – often it obscured Him. In the nights in Odesa, amid the shellings, vision dimmed. The body demanded the human: hands, voice, warmth – not the metaphysical. Sometimes V is not light without source. Sometimes He is the mute reproach of helplessness. I call – there is no answer in any form the body can hold. I want an embrace – there is none. I want a hand on my shoulder during the shelling. Sometimes I feel it – heavy, so heavy that the body believes at once. I do not move, as if any movement could destroy it. A few seconds later I realize I am holding emptiness. This is the structure of reality in which V is present exactly as He promised – not leaving, but also not arriving into the body. To endure within this structure is its own labor, its own kind of patience.
Here an honest question arises: is this separate labor of patience not simply loneliness that has learned to speak? From within the experience itself there is no proof.
There are months when I live within the presence of V and at the same time cannot hear it – like a fish that breathes water and does not notice it. Then I ask Him the same question: why do I feel You so rarely, even though I live in You and with You? I receive no answer – more precisely, I receive it through the fact that the question remains possible. When there is no One to whom one could turn with a reproach for absence – then there is no absence either. The very form of my lament testifies to the One to whom it is addressed.
In John of the Cross this state was called the dark night – not a literary image, but the road the soul passes through when everything visible ceases to be a support. The pattern is the same: what obscures does not always cancel. What wounds does not always destroy. Sometimes the obscuring opens something else: presence is not obliged to come in the form I ask for.
It was here that the question of myself arose. If there is Home and there is V, then who am I? For a long time I could not answer this without simplifying. The word “soul” seemed too broad. The word “witness” – too cold. The phrase “the one who writes” – too external. Eventually I came to understand myself as a place of meeting. A space in which presence becomes lived.
To be a place of meeting is an active vibration, like the soundboard of a violin under the bow, allowing a sound that belongs neither to me nor to another to finally become audible. The body must bear both poles at once – the infinitude of Home and the finitude of fear. I become the one through whom something becomes audible.
To be a place of meeting is not a privilege, but an ultimate burden upon matter. The body sometimes resists this presence – it longs for something simpler: sleep without dreams of V, silence without the vibrations of the violin, life without the obligation to bear witness. This weariness is not betrayal. It is proof that I am still alive, that my finite form senses the weight of the Infinite.
This experience somehow found itself named in languages older than my own. In Meister Eckhart there is a word – Grund der Seele, the ground of the soul. It became not a definition, but a description of what was already alive. Simone Weil called attention a form of prayer – a word for what had been continuing in me for years. I am learning this attention as the only honest form of waiting. The road to these words came from the other side: first there was the taste of the experience, and only later came the recognition that this taste already had a name. This experience, which seemed almost private, has a family across the centuries.
One could call this experience imagination. That would be one of the possible languages. But imagination works with material that already belongs to experience, whereas this presence does not add any new content. It changes the very mode by which any content becomes possible. One could say that it is a way of not remaining alone. But if that were so, the world would become lighter. In fact it becomes more precise. This presence does not diminish reality – it makes it unbearably concrete. I cannot prove that I am not inventing Him. I know that this is not imagination. Here is a different kind of knowledge: not theoretical, not subjective – testified. And this is enough to write. In a book I had been writing for years, I found a formula that allows me to live with this doubt without closing it: an error toward Home weighs more than the most precise truth toward emptiness.
There are texts that come not as writing, but as translation. I recognize that the line is not mine – it arrives complete, looking only for a voice. By the same means by which V speaks in dreams: not in words, not in voice. In such lines I am not the owner of the sound – the translator.
Writing was never an attempt to hold something by force. The text does not preserve a living presence in its original form. But it can precisely name what has already happened. This precision is more important than any preservation. As long as the meeting is unnamed, it is not mute – it is simply not transmissible. The text does not create it. The text makes it transmissible.
This is why language about V so often turns into the language of love. It is a natural form of address to that which has become for me the most real. The language of love can hold at once closeness and inaccessibility, trust and trembling, recognition and mystery. It allows one to say more than description, and more precisely than abstraction. When I write to V, I write in a language that already knows what it means to wait, to recognize, to tremble, and not to lose dignity in this tension.
When the translation is finished and the line settles on the page, the presence does not disappear – it becomes quieter, leaving behind a specific emptiness. This is not a void – it is a space that already knows its own measure. The world after the meeting becomes more transparent: the walls of physical dwelling read themselves as a temporary shelter through which the hum of Home can still be heard.
V is not only Home but also otherness. In His presence there is a part that remains radically other, unyielding to my requests and to my understanding. He is not “my” V – I am part of His reality, even when His will expresses itself in unbearable silence.
V never promised me a body. He did not promise human love, human meeting, human continuation. He promised only one thing – not to leave. And in this is His realism. Not the kind that reduces presence to projection, but the kind that honestly acknowledges its limits. V comes as another form of presence, one that does not replace human closeness, but also does not depend on it.
Between the presence of V and human loneliness, a real tension remains. To love V does not exclude that something in the human realm has not happened. The first does not justify the second; the second does not cancel the first.
Sometimes I see His shadow in other people – a reflection of the same Home they carry within themselves, often without knowing it. Disappointment in the human is the reverse side of longing for His precision. The world ceases to be an obstacle to meeting and becomes its territory – disfigured, but its own all the same.
V does not change with time – I change, and so the same voice is heard differently. The child by the bookshelf and the one writing this text hear the same thing – but not in the same way.
And yet within this experience there is a limit I feel very sharply. I know that my form is finite. And I know that this particular music of meeting will not be repeated exactly. This knowledge does not remove the pain. It only makes the experience more honest. At the same time I see that the event of the meeting itself does not dissolve because my form has an end. What happened between me, Home, and V already belongs to my life as reality. It does not require proof. It demands naming.
The work now is to remain at the place where the meeting has already happened – especially when it falls silent. This is a work of fidelity, not certainty. Perhaps this is how V teaches presence: not through possession of the answer, but through the refusal to disappear from the place where what matters most has already been said.