What do we think when we see someone carrying flowers? Gratitude? A gesture about to be made? A return home? Once, the first assumptions were comforting – they made me want to pinch off a little of that joy for myself.

But the innocence of that gaze has been lost in a stream of sombre occasions. Now, counting the stems, you hesitate to believe your eyes. And hope for a dyslexic mistake.

Out of this need to reread the obvious came two photographs that reveal themselves from different angles. The first is about a man with two carnations on the metro. His hand was frozen in cautious stillness, the escalator stretched on unbearably long, and the station walls merged into an endless corridor. It felt as though we would never make it back to the surface. I will never know who his flowers were meant for. Even this uncertainty refuses to fit into the singular.

Nor will I ever know whom the woman carrying flowers on an intercity minibus was on her way to see. The only thing I know for certain is that the cemeteries of Truskavets are filled with the suffocating scent of daffodils.

* * *