I have this one particular memory I keep coming back to.

My friend Mizuki and I are sitting in Vancouver’s Whole Foods cafe. The conversation is flowing as always, and we start reminiscing about our hometowns — her suburban Canadian Kelowna and my average-townish Ukrainian Mykolaiv. How quite polar opposite our experiences of growing up must have been!

My friend comes up with a brilliant idea of “walking each other” through them on Google Maps. We hurry to find our exact house locations on a 3d map: here is the school I went to, and here is the park next to my house. Our environments look foreign to each other, yet the warmness of our memories adds another layer of depth to them. It makes those plain house boxes come alive, almost like we imagined our toys would suddenly wake up just when we fallen asleep as kids.

I can still go back to Google Maps and see my little neighborhood from above. Frozen in time, looking just like russia never invaded my country.

But it looks nothing like this anymore.

All the houses still look whole on this map.

This is what it looks like after April 27, 2023, the second time it was attacked (the first one was in March 2022, you can read more about it here). Russians nearly repeated the trajectory, landing the missile on a historical building beside that first spot. My house stands in between — suffering the most traumatic blasts both times.

My house is on the top left corner (Credit: Nikvesti)

Waking up that day, I couldn’t think I would see my house featured on Zelenskiy’s Instagram (bad omen; he mainly posts consequences of russian attacks). My family thought it was “safe” to return, given there hadn’t been any attacks for almost 5 months. The week they do, russians hit our exact 50m2 area for the second time…

It was a clean green area once, but this is what my backyard looks right now (Credit: Nikvesti)

Two rocket missiles blew up 20 meters from our apartment, causing a powerful shock wave that destroyed windows, roofs, and walls in all nearby houses. The window in our bedroom flew out, hit the opposite wall, and crashed right onto the bed. The glass from our little library shattered all over it too.

Luckily, my mom hadn’t slept at home that night — I don’t even want to imagine what would have been otherwise. But my grandparents, living 5 minutes away from us, peacefully slept at home. All windows there shattered too, leaving them to sleep in the cold of the night till my mom arrived in the morning. They ended up shocked but not wounded.

The window flew through the whole room, but didn’t break. In comparison to how other apartments look like, we got lucky.

I wasn’t there both times. For some reason, I have to keep living…

— My mom

This wasn’t the case for everyone in our neighborhood — 25 wounded, 1 killed. Some have been buried under the rubble of collapsed walls, some injured from sleeping nearby the windows. It’s easy to dissociate from statistics when you don’t know anyone personally included in it.

But I’ve lived in that area for 17 years. Those people did not merely live nearby — they are the faces I’ve probably seen most frequently in my life, day in and day out. Every morning, afternoon, and evening. I knew most of them personally — the old lady who would always feed the stray cats, the weird grandma who would always forget my name, the nice auntie from the 3d floor who would always joke around with me.

And, of course, all of the kids. I nearly grew up with all of them, coming out to play games in our yard every evening. We would come over to each other’s apartments, eat junk food we secretly bought at a nearby store, or just fool around. Stories now buried under the rubble.

I have a miserable amount of pictures left, documenting the area I grew up in. I regret it now. If yours is still intact, please take pictures of it

On some weekdays, I would go to my English tutor, who lived in the house next to ours. It’s a weirdly comforting memory of mine: we would pass through a small tight corridor right to her bedroom, with a small table right in the corner, and study English grammar over and over again. This house suffered the most from the explosion — I bet there is a hole instead of that little wooden table I occupied.

I would see this little green square from her apartment’s windows. Ironically, it was called “Kindness.” Destroyed by russians.

Having the experience of my family being nearly killed both times, our residential area destroyed.. Seeing each new russian missile targeting another house, I think not merely of the buildings demolished.

I see the fabric of society fall apart.

• The communities that were formed there.
• The generations of families building their nests in one space.
• The invisible thread of a microcosm intertwining all the apartments together.

A house is like a living organism, with its body and soul. Years and years of characters, history, and spirit all in one place — destroyed in one second. People left without a home are like actors with a burnt-down theatre, without a plan or purpose. Internal migrants of their own town, they scatter around like ghosts, unable to return to where they’ve come from.

I visualised my house with the same X-ray vision as in this graphic novel. There was a life on its own in every room (Credit: Alison Bechdel)

We need individual stories. Without individuals, we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, ‘casualties may rise to a million’. With individual stories, the statistics become people — but even then that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless.

— Neil Gaiman, American Gods

In an increasingly individualistic world, people have difficulty looking beyond their own experiences. Gaiman is right: it’s impossible to think of all the tragedies as individual ones, or our psyche would break from the amount of suffering happening in the world even at this very moment.

Yet we should never lose our capability to be human, to empathize, to put ourselves into each other’s shoes. Never isolate to the little islands of our suffering, never confine ourselves to the comfortable prisons of our own.

Remember — we’re all interconnected (Credit: AMACAD)

War always brings a spectrum of suffering. Even while experiencing my own tragedy, I never stop thinking of the bigger and deeper ones that this war has brought upon Ukrainians.

That’s why I see my memory of walking through my city on Google Maps in a much different light now. Because there is one city for which Google maps have been updated since the beginning of this criminal war. Mariupol — a city completely destroyed by russians, turned into a living hell on earth. You can take a walk there and see for yourself.

Mariupol before it was bombed by russians (Credit: Correspondent.net)

Imagine a vibrant city by the sea of almost half a million people, the size of American San Jose. Many migrants escaping the war in 2014 chose to move there: it’s close enough to “home” that has been taken away from them.

Just a small part of what the city looks like now (Credit: ABC news)

A city that is now completely wiped out. With all of its schools, cinemas, malls, neighborhoods. With the generations, networks, and communities that inhabited it. Nothing but a ruin. And a war crime, so well captured and documented by modern technology.

Google Maps 2021/2023 view show it all (Credit: The Guardian)

For people from Mariupol, there is no other “version” of their city to return to, virtually and physically. They can endlessly cherish the memories of what has been, now replaced by an alternative “russian” (meaning postapocalyptic) version of it.

For russians, Mariupol became a popular Instagram destination. “Aesthetics of destruction,” as they call it. This should tell you everything about russians.