izyum, part ii: “that’s my cup”

March 20, 2025

Last year, when I visited the destruction at 2 Pershotravneva Street, I photographed a cup painted with red and yellow tulips, bearing an English inscription that contained the words “beloved” and “happiness.” I found it in an apartment ripped asunder and hanging four stories high in the air at the edge of sheered off wall.  It caught my eye with its bright glint of red color amid its ashen resting place. I posted a video of this cup on social media (video below).  A week after returning home from Ukraine, I received a comment on that post. It read: 

“Це моя чашка”

“That’s my cup.”

Just as the haunting memory of this place began to seep into my bone marrow forever, someone had reached out from the grave to claim what was theirs.  Compressing time and distance, smashing the particles of life with the eternity of death, came a voice, an ethereal ribbon between the past and the present.  

When I collected my thoughts, I answered the messenger and she began to share her story.  When the full scale russian invasion began, she was living in the apartment with her elderly mother.  On March 7, two days before the bombing, she heeded the warnings of an impending russian attack and evacuated from Izyum.  She tried to persuade her mother to leave, but her mother refused, discounting the severity of the threat.  Her mother never thought it possible that the russian war machine would tear the sky open to obliterate her life, home and town.  She died in the bomb strike.  The tulip cup belonged to her, a gift from her daughter for International Women’s Day, almost exactly a year earlier on March 8, 2021. 

Much like this elderly mother, most Ukrainian people would come to learn overnight that things which were once utterly impossible to imagine would come to pass.  They never envisioned the scale of atrocities that would be inflicted on by their neighbors from the east. 

Likewise, most of them did not think it possible to stand up to and bravely fight their brutal invaders.  Three years in, those who have survived have acclimated to their new apocalyptic reality.  It is pushing them in innovative directions, teaching them adaptive strategies, inventing new technologies, hardening their resilience to survive World War III.  There is no option other than facing and preparing for the future, while standing atop the disintegrating rubble and the fresh graves of their children, elderly parents and fallen soldiers.  

Musical score by Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk