In 2022 I left Russia because of the war and arrived in Georgia, partly by circumstance, partly because of love. Over two and a half years in Tbilisi I tried to understand the place, build connections, find something that felt like home. Along the way I lost a sense of who I was and had to rebuild it, as well as navigate the changing relationship with my partner. Big Cherry is a diaristic record of that period.

The title borrows from New York's Big Apple: Tbilisi had become something like that, pulling people in from everywhere. Georgians, Nigerian and Indian students, Russians, my partner and myself, all of us passing through, looking for somewhere to land.

Tbilisi never became home, and perhaps that was always the point.