The Story
Between Two Skies began with one Ukrainian family, but its emotional geography belongs to no single country. It is about what happens when a person leaves one life before another has fully begun.
Before the war, we had not planned to emigrate. We lived in the Bucha district of the Kyiv region. There was work, school, family, familiar roads and a home we had spent years building as the place where our children would grow up. It was ordinary life — the kind whose value often becomes clearest only when it stops being guaranteed.
In February 2022, that certainty disappeared overnight. We woke to explosions. The world narrowed to immediate questions: where was safer, where would the children sleep, would there be power, how could school continue, how do you protect a family when you do not know what tomorrow will bring? Leaving was not one sudden decision. It grew slowly from the realization that childhood could not be built around a permanent expectation of danger.
In September 2023, we arrived in Toronto. We were safe and deeply grateful for that, but we were also beginning again. A rented apartment first felt temporary. Then came school, familiar parks, work, neighbours, friends and repeated routes through the city. Less than a year later, returning to Toronto after a short trip, we looked down from the plane and caught ourselves calling it home.
That did not erase Ukraine from our lives. It made the word home more complicated. One part of our story remained there while another began to put down roots here. Between Two Skies grew from that inner space: between memory and the present, gratitude and longing, the person you were and the person you are becoming.
The story is still unfinished. We have found a new home in Canada, yet the difficult path toward permanent residence leaves an important part of the future unresolved. Physically, our life is here: our children are growing here, and our work, friendships, routines and plans are here. Legally, however, the sense of permanent ground beneath us has not fully arrived. In that uncertainty, the title takes on another meaning: we are no longer there, but our here is not yet unconditional.
This story began with one Ukrainian family, but it is not only about Ukraine. People leave home because of war, persecution, instability, economics, family, hope or the simple need to survive and begin again. The details differ. The emotional state of having left one life before the next one has fully become yours belongs to millions of people.