As the bus turned a bend, there it was, the huge hangar. Looming ahead, waiting for our arrival. I hopped off the bus and walked inside. It was vast, cold and silent. The kind of silence that carries weight, the kind that presses against your chest. And in the middle of it all stood what was left of MH17. The front section of the aircraft had been painstakingly reconstructed ‒ twisted metal, scorched panels, fragments of what once carried two hundred and ninety-eight lives through the sky. It was both familiar and foreign, the outline of a plane that once represented connection, movement, return, now a haunting skeleton of loss. As I stepped closer, my eyes searched for where they had sat. Row numbers, window positions, things I once associated with boarding passes and holiday excitement, became coordinates of heartbreak. There were no rows and there were no seats, just a shell of the plane. To stand where my parents had been sitting was almost unbearable. The air felt thick with absence.