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I Base New York September 27, 2020   War breaks out A war to wipe a country off the map A country that is not on the map to begin with   Artsakh   A name that feels a bit ours, among my Armenian friends, because we know where this unmapped place is and, although I am an odar (a ‘non-Armenian’), also a bit mine, because I have been there and it has since been in me    Two summers ago, I arrived in Armenia with a couple of fellow writers to teach at the Center for Creative Technologies in Yerevan known as TUMO (after the national poet, Hovhannes Tumanyan) We were supposed to fly home shortly after the last session of our three week-long workshop The nonfiction and poetry instructors left as planned, but I, the fiction teacher, wasn’t ready to go back to New York, where I lived I postponed my ticket for another week And then for another And another    The Caucasus enfolded me With diaspora Armenians flocking into Yerevan for the summer, my circle of friends quickly expanded, as did my understanding of Armenia and its fraught borders I learned about the existence of an adjacent state to the east: a self-proclaimed republic nestled in the mountains At every mention of its deep green forests, its waterfalls, and monasteries, the fictional country found its way into my imagination The name itself seemed to have wonder inbuilt into its utterance: two ‘ah’s culminating in an exhalation So, one morning, I went to the bus station by myself and jumped on a van headed to Artsakh      II Ascent Nagorno Karabakh July 30, 2018   ‘how are you????’   A text from a friend arrives when I am in the marshrutka, a routed passenger van, four hours and many miles away from Yerevan, as we reach what Google Maps signals as the edge of Artsakh    ‘how are you????’ carrying the implicit question: ‘where the hell are you?’    Another text arrives with an answer: ‘Welcome to Azerbaijan Calls cost $179/min, text $05 to send and $005 to receive Enjoy your trip’   My phone vibrates again, and again, and again, and again    ‘Welcome to