"Wait for the Spring / Дочекайся весни"
Winter in this song isn't only weather. It's any season you have to live through without proof that it ends.
Wait for the Spring — Дочекайся весни — is my song about staying alive inside that kind of cold. It's spoken straight to someone — maybe a friend, maybe an earlier version of me — in a real February, not a metaphorical one. The first lines are exactly what those nights feel like:
February's drawing frost across the glass,
You close all the windows, let the dark thoughts pass.
Heavy is the night that you carry alone,
the light got lost somewhere, you feel turned to stone.
And then, gently, the turn — not a rescue, just a request to look up for a second:
But open your eyes for a moment and stay:
the world isn't over — it's only grey.
That word, grey, is the whole argument. Grey is not black. Grey is a thing that changes. The chorus is built on the image at the center of the song — that an ending and a beginning are the same line, just seen from two sides:
So stay alive — let the spring break through!
The end and the start are the same — it's true,
just two facing sides, so don't fade away —
life sleeps under snow, and will bloom into May.
In Ukrainian the same idea lands as one clean line — the end and the beginning are one line:
Тож живи — і прийде весна!
Кінець і початок — лінія одна
(So live — and spring will come! / The end and the start are one line)
What I love about the song is that it doesn't try to philosophize you out of the dark. Most of it is small and concrete. It lists actual reasons to stay: a film you love still coming to screens, summer, friends, the green, warm days gathering by a fire. Spring isn't an abstraction here. It's specific things you'd hate to miss.
That film that you love is still coming to screens,
the summer will hold you, the friends, and the green.
The bridge is where the song gets quietest and most honest. The instruments thin out, and there's almost a whisper — even black and white are only one light — and then a plain, steady promise:
(February passes. You'll be here. I know.)
(Лютий минеться. Ти будеш. Я знаю.)
This is also, quietly, a song for anyone living through a hard wait — counting down to an answer, a return, a season they're not sure they'll reach. I won't dress that up. Sometimes you're waiting on something enormous and out of your hands, and all you can do is endure with dignity and refuse to believe the cold when it tells you it's permanent. It always tells you that. It never is.
In my catalog this one is a sister to the songs about holding on. Stay. Hold on. Bloom. says don't disappear. Wait for the Spring says and here's how you don't — you trust the thaw before you can feel it. It's holding on with a horizon attached: not gripping forever, gripping until spring.
And so it resolves where all my songs resolve — in opening, not collapse. Winter lies about being the end; the truth is dormancy, not death:
life sleeps under snow, and will bloom into May
So: дочекайся весни. Wait for the spring. Make it that far. It's been coming for you the whole time you've been waiting — and you will be there to see it break through.