Photographer: Carol Guzy

Borodianka, Ukraine. April 21, 2022.

Eerie paintings in shades of burnt sienna. Remnants of everyday life, frozen in a macabre stillness at the precise moment time stopped when Russian bombs rained down on Ukraine’s dwellings in liberated towns of Irpin, Borodianka and Kharkiv. Baby cribs and wheelchairs. A kitchen table still holds food left uneaten. What were they cooking that last day of normal?

Twisted metal, empty chairs, melted microwaves. Charred cameras that once held tender family photos. A coffee cup sits on a table near a recliner, singed and flaking. Precious mementoes reduced to dust. Yet Exquisite light kisses the scorched palette. Lives interrupted. Or extinguished. Too painful to ponder what the power of these weapons of destruction does to human flesh at the point of impact.

Civilian things. Not the stuff of combatants. Humanity’s hopes, dreams, loves – in war, they are merely ‘collateral damage’. A popular cat café is in ruins, once the scene of camaraderie and conversation over cappuccinos. Broken glass becomes a metaphor for shattered lives. Survivors, saved from the bombardment by a fickle destiny of circumstance, visit in bittersweet homecomings to pick through pieces of their former reality.

Others will never return. Their life’s breath now a faded memory among precious keepsakes scattered in living rooms of ash.