"The first song — Stay. Hold on. Bloom. / Не Зникай. Стій. Цвіти."
There's a season I'll carry for the rest of my life — the one where a lot of us weren't sure we'd be allowed to stay.
I had built a life here on purpose. Work I loved, a quiet place in Denver, mornings that felt earned. And then the ground under all of it started to feel provisional — like it could be taken back by a decision I had no part in. I'm Ukrainian. I came here, I made a home, and suddenly the question wasn't what will I become. It was quieter and colder than that: will I be allowed to remain at all.
I didn't write a song to fix that. I couldn't fix it. I wrote a song to survive it.
That song is Не Зникай. Стій. Цвіти., and its English twin, Stay. Hold on. Bloom. It's the first thing I ever made as Tatimost, and it arrived almost like an instruction I needed to hear in my own voice. Don't disappear. Stand. Bloom. I said it the way you say something to a friend who's slipping — gently, and then again, harder, until they believe you.
I make my music with AI as my instrument, and I will never hide that. I'm not going to pretend a band played in a room I wasn't in. The tools are astonishing — but they don't know what any of this costs. The fear was mine. The choosing was mine. AI is the instrument; the soul is the compass. That first night, the instrument let me build something true faster than my hands alone ever could, and I needed it to be fast, because I was holding on by my fingernails.
I wrote it twice — once in Ukrainian, once in English — because I am two things at once, and I'm done asking which one is real. The Ukrainian carries the specific fear: the exact weight of it, for the people who'll know what I mean without explanation. The English opens the same door for anyone who has ever waited on an answer that wasn't theirs to give. Not a translation. Two voices for one truth.
Here is the thing I learned writing it: blooming is not the same as winning. To bloom is just to keep opening — to keep being yourself, in color, out loud — while you're still afraid. That's the most defiant thing I know. Anyone can flower once the danger passes. The refrain asks for something harder: stay now, stand now, bloom now, in the middle of not knowing.
And I didn't only make it for me. I made it for every Ukrainian in America who was lying awake doing the same math I was. Не зникай — don't disappear — is the most important word in the whole song, because disappearing was the real temptation. To go quiet. To make yourself small enough to not be noticed, not be sent away. The song refuses that. It says: be more visible, not less. Bloom louder.
I'll be honest about how it ends, because honesty is the whole point of what I do: this song was made before the answer came. It doesn't promise rescue. It promises something better — that I will not vanish while I wait. Let us stay. Hold on. Let's bloom.
This is where my whole catalog begins. Everything that comes after it — the letting go, the opening, the wide sky — only makes sense because first, in the dark, I decided to stay.